Records of the Prince
by Some Magician
Summary: LoS. For centuries, Alucard planned the apocalypse to end with Satan, Zobek, Dracula, and himself finally dead and humanity free from evil, but his father spared him. Now, he must decide what happens now: finish his plan or choose his family? Help his father exist in a new era or destroy him and face eternity alone? Can the Dragon even find a future or will his past drag him down?
1. Prologue: An Invitation

**—** **Records of the Prince—**

 _Disclaimer: I do not own Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and I make no profit from publishing this._

 _General Warning(s): This fic will call out trigger-y content by chapter. Generally, it contains stressful and scary situations, discussion of suicidal intent/ideation, supernatural violence, murder, and negative emotions. This fic is not historically accurate (neither is the source work, but I'll admit to it). This fic's religious views are heavily influenced by Victor Hugo musicals. There is no canon character death (that isn't already canon), but it is unhealthy to be an original character in this fic. If they belong to me, they aren't safe._

 _Basically, this fic likes to be snarky and light-hearted, but then, the tigers come at night._

 **Prologue—An Invitation**

"What happens now?" he asked.

Dawn came and sent light over the street under the Old Cathedral and its traffic of ruin and corpses. A storm of science and religion had passed over the towers of the city the night before when Satan forced his passage onto the mortal plane with armies of both to shake down the human confidence and scatter its technical wonders. The burning hulk of a passenger jet and the riot machines of the city police, dismantled and abandoned, lay alongside misshapen bodies of human men manufactured into demons. Only the mad winking of a traffic light and the red lighting of a club called Snow stood as testament to anything so sweet as electricity and order in the Arts District.

But at last, the fires began to cool. The jet fuel in the gutters siphoned off quietly into sewers, with spurts of demon blood, as the body of the King of Hell baked in the street. The hole the Prince of Darkness put in his heart with the broken stipes of his battle cross melted across Satan's torso as his corpse congealed. His face collapsed in black ooze, stringy with his own hair, as one of his lungs popped and spewed foul air in the young sun.

And the vampire Alucard asked again, but only to himself this time, _'What happens now?'_

After receiving no answer from himself or his father, Alucard climbed from the crater in the middle of the street and followed after his father into the shuttered church. A ray of morning chased him until it shrank in the shadow of his father's sanctuary, not daring to cross the Dragon's threshold, as the great doors clattered shut behind his son.

If God had returned to the world at long last, it was not felt, even here. Christ hung in quiet and shadow, robed in red and crowned in blood and thorns, above the ring of candlelight and pillars where Alucard had brought down Death's Lieutenant and taken his armor and his sword. If the armor knew where its master had died, it gave no claim—but Masamune throbbed faint yet steady, as if in memory—until a crackle of falling gravel drew Alucard's attention to the back of the church and a crude opening cut into the stone wall there. In the cave beyond it, the last of the Old Castle's towers lifted into the reaches of the cathedral. Even as it was there, hiding in the heart of the cathedral, the castle was beyond feeling now—hollowed out, a shadow of its former power.

Gravel fell again—Dracul was climbing.

Alucard ducked into the hole and called up into the tower:

"What do you intend to do? Father!"

Still, Dracul ignored him, even as Alucard took after him, leaping up through the ruined floors. He caught and clung to the face of a granite woman fused with a dragon, hanging on one of her horns as his gauntlet clawed the stone. High above, a blur of his father's red coat slipped over the lip of the oubliette and vanished. The statue shifted beneath him, a crack across her brow, as Alucard buckled back before leaping to another handhold and finishing the climb. He reached the doorway to the inner sanctum and stopped.

Morning shone through the shattered rose window at the back of the chamber, throwing a jagged star on the stage before Dracul's throne. His father had paused at this light; it lay at his boots like a pool of fire. With the clenching of his fist, the sleeve of Dracul's coat retreated to his shoulder, unraveling in threads of blood and smoke, as he dipped his hand in the sunlight. Alucard jolted—a flash of fire in his own skin as he remembered the Daemon Lord lifting his dead flesh up to the sunlight—

—He cooked at once, his body _immolating_ —

But now, nothing happened: Dracul's skin only glowed like cancer, white as new cement. Lightly, it smoked—giving off a fine mist, but this too tapered off. He pulled his hand back, his coat repairing itself.

"I had hoped," he said. The sunlight came around his boots like the slow crawl of a tide. "I am His chosen—even still—and no manifestation of His power may destroy me."

 _'_ _Not even sunlight,'_ Alucard thought, knowing that only artifacts stood between him and burning alive—the Lieutenant's lightless armor, an ancient ring from Carmilla's day—but while his father might blister, burn if he chose, he would never be destroyed—

The sunlight stretched, reaching the top of the stairs and seeping into the entryway like a spill of gold, as Dracul squinted in the light and stepped into the shadow of his throne.

"You should not stand there," he told Alucard wearily as he sat and rested chin on hand. God was not so adamant of other vampires. The sun crept steadily, passing over shards of the rose window strewn over the stage. The fragments shivered, edged suddenly in red light, and jumped into the air from the floor after Alucard threw out his hand and cast time backward. The dusty pieces melded with their fellows among the stone spokes of the window and sealed out the sun.

"Clever. I've never had the head for such magic."

Alucard did not dwell on how abundantly obvious that was.

"I've had sufficient time to learn," he said instead, and at this, Dracul shifted on his throne and said nothing. Alucard carried on, crossing the stage to the dais, where, even reclining, Dracul still sat higher than his guests. Again, he pressed: "What will you do now?"

Dracul leaned forward suddenly on his throne, hands together and tented—in thought.

"I don't know." He paused. "I do not want you to have to kill me."

"We are both different," Alucard stopped, 'men' on the tip of his tongue, as they were not men, had not been for ages, "—now. I will never _want_ to kill you—but if you ask it of me—"

"I will not ask," Dracul said firmly, his voice an echo and all around, as Alucard stepped back, his wielding hand going to the hilt of Crissaegrim at his side.

"Then I will not kill you."

It was not all lie; it was not all truth either. Alucard had had centuries to watch his father worry the hearts of humanity. Sudden moods of peace were still not unlike him. Five hundred years, reigning over men cowed in complete terror, was still a long time, and his interests in dashing their lives, their faith in their world, waxed and waned. But even when 'disinterested,' he still paced like an unknown animal around what little fire humankind had against the night. He was rhythmic: striking out when God and humanity disappointed him, wasting the Brotherhood of Light when they rose up his walls, before retreating into his darkness again.

The most violent years had followed the last act of Trevor Belmont—the brave, the foolhardy.

But though heartful these days, Dracul was surely still morose and _fickle_ as ever, and there was no killing him if he did not ask for it—Alucard learned that long ago.

 _'_ _And I have worked centuries for this moment,'_ he reminded himself. _'This trust—if I chose to exploit it—'_ His hand still rested on Crissaegrim. _'—he might not anticipate me—_

 _—_ _but he is different now.'_

For the first time, in a long time, Alucard lived unplanned moments. While much that had happened he meant to bring about, he had not meant for this. He had planned all along to lure an old humanity back to reside in his father, to dwell where it hadn't for over a thousand years, but he had not planned for his hesitation, his dilemma—he had not planned to wonder like this:

 _'_ _What happens now?'_

His father's suicide had always been the final goal of his plan, no matter how the Prince of Darkness ended it, but Alucard had not planned to live to see it—he had not planned to _survive_. For over five hundred years, he planned meticulously to bring Zobek, Satan, his father, and _himself_ —together—to end them all at once and leave humanity in peace, free of dark creatures for the first time since creation. It had all fallen together so neatly: the Acolytes, then Zobek, and as the headless body of the leviathan dropped through the sky, Satan flew to him like a moth. They locked together on a rail toward death—all according to plan.

Because evil never asked questions—only seized opportunities. Satan did not even rifle through his heart for anything more dangerous than his residual hatred for his father, his childhood suffering. And he had meant for it to happen that way.

He had also meant to be dead by now. He had meant for his father to kill him to kill Satan, and for that returned humanity to crack with the strain and destroy the Prince of Darkness—as only Gabriel Belmont could slay Dracul, truly. Then mother, son, and father would all go to death together—happily ever after—at last! A fairy tale ending he sold to a tortured devil—or had tried to—

 _'_ _What will happen now?'_

Now that they lived?

Where his mother had been so sure of his redemption, her faith in God and her Gabriel springing eternal, Alucard still wavered, uncertain: _'I have his trust, but have I given him mine? Do I allow a beast to live? Because for now, it is calm? Because it has made me—promises?'_

—Or made Trevor promises.

It was simple to make promises to a boy like that in a cold castle, to a son in that small, human shape, and his father so desperately wanted to make promises to that shape—

—That shape of Gabriel's boy.

 _'_ _It almost disappointed me,'_ Alucard thought. It still disconcerted him to find what could only be earnest yearning for connection in the monster who had taken everything he loved from him—his son, his wife, his mother, _and_ his father—and left him with a creature who wore his father's likeness and spoke so glibly of his mother's murder, when he did not know who she was—

Walking as Trevor again, as a child again, had woken— _resentments_ he had thought himself done with, but the emotions still tangled inside him. Wielding that child specter had been—too strange. He had projected the boy in much the way he projected the ghostly, blue wolf. But as the wolf needed his full attention to summon and command, Trevor could be trusted with errands, to act independently. So, Trevor minded his father within the castle, while Alucard minded him without. Through the mission, the child reported back fragmented memories of the Prince's doings in the castle, like voices from a long dream.

But it still should have been more difficult for the specter to send his father hither and yon, up and down his castle's dark dreamscapes, into Agreus' twisting garden and the Toymaker's theatre—for fragments of the object that ruined them. _'He should have resisted me,_ ' and Alucard had anticipated resistance. He took conscious control of Trevor only rarely and seized the boy just once to request that his father go seeking the Mirror—and he did. He did—without resistance. He did—when resistance would have been sensible! What did a child need with pieces of the Mirror of Fate? Had the long sleep made the Prince of Darkness foolish? One 'Why?', even unspoken, would have ended the entire charade.

But it never came, and away his father always went, after petting his head—his touches always light, cautious, as if some spell would break with a touch too heavy—and then away to dark woods; to dark curtains; to the final moments of another of their brood—with that singular purpose, to bring the spirit of his boy the Mirror of Fate because he asked for it—

 _'—_ _which is not strange,'_ Alucard thought at last, in spite of himself. He had fleeting memories of his own boy wanting things—a thousand years ago—and his wanting nothing else but to give them to him—whatever they were. He remembered it well—his memories of his child almost brighter than those of his wife. He remembered caring for his own small son, his Simon, when he was toothless and pale, even his ears feathered in red hair, with no awareness that the world were any greater than Mother and Father. To be needed purely by such a small person rooted in an emptiness he hadn't known he had before he became a father. That kind of need so fundamentally human that the Old Castle could only whisper and lie to its Prince about it, filling the red passageways between its master's dreams and reality with spiteful mutterings.

 _'_ _What will happen now—'_ Alucard decided as he dropped his hand from his sword, unsure if his father saw the gesture, _'—is I will have to find out if he will keep his word, or if he will tire of this—arrangement._

 _I will wait a little longer, and watch._

 _But I will take him away from this city. Europa has suffered him long enough. If it must come to that, I will make Ameria our battleground—'_

"You are solemn," Dracul said, interrupting Alucard's thoughts and bringing him back to the stage, a full, hot wheel of colored light spreading the cool stone under the window. The next question was awkward—entirely for its newness. They had never spoken like this. "What is on your mind?"

"What _I_ intend to do now," Alucard said, stepping away. The light followed him with all the ruthless confidence of a new day. Since his death, he made a point in all his dealings with his father never to lie to him directly. In his final hour as Trevor Belmont, he had thought his father unworthy of speaking honestly to—and perhaps this had cost him. So now, he concealed, yes, he omitted truth, of course, but he never spoke false words—and never did he deceive with the intent to cause pain. Everything around his father lied; everything around him caused pain. His castle lied with its halls haunted and its many voices incessant, crying and cursing at once, as it demanded blood and pain at every lock and infernal device.

To be a voice of truth to the dark lord of such a place, and a mostly bloodless truth at that, was not to be taken lightly, so Alucard chose his words with precision to maintain that position. It had been easy for Trevor, the boy, with that trust all but handed to him, but Dracul and Alucard were on changed grounds now.

So, Alucard began sincerely, "I had thought this would end differently," and dropped his voice. "I did not expect to live." He considered the next part carefully, and after faltering, "Thank you, Fath—"

"No." Dracul was standing now. "That is—not needed." Alucard conceded, and the silence lingered between them as Dracul returned to the throne. Morning was not far and pressed hard at the window. Its pieces repaired by magic beginning to shudder as the present filtered back to them. Alucard conjured the helm of his armor with an open hand and fitted the mask to his face. It wrapped around him like an alien of onyx glass. The helmet splitting into black and liquid arms that sucked up his preternatural features—his face cracked with scars, his moon-lit hair, his eyes ravenous and golden—before it sealed his voice inside the robotic cast of Zobek's Lieutenant.

"What do you intend to do, son?" Dracul asked, watching. Meanwhile, morning split the rose window like a crack of lightning, pieces of stained glass littering the stage again.

"I suppose I will go home," Alucard said, cockily mechanical inside the Lieutenant's armor. A bolt of sunlight fell across the face of the helm, the vampire underneath undisturbed.

"Home?" Dracul echoed—as if he had never imagined there could be any home—but there was—had been, even—at least for Alucard. Long ago, his fatherland had grown haunted and too full of memory, even as the modern era sheared the woods and dammed the rivers of his youth. Still, he felt the lines left of those places, even the remains of the Brotherhood Stronghold—where his wife died and his son's childhood ended. Hundreds of years later, the city had erected a gothic fortress for their police department there: a fort with a marble lobby, a sea of offices, crime laboratories, stone lockups, and an underground warehouse of riot gear.

Perhaps, that building had finally stopped burning—if the fires hadn't reached the ammunitions hold. If they did, the shells stored there would pop apart while rockets swelled and ruptured in an explosion that would easily take out half the city block around it.

Even the landmarks built on Trevor Belmont's ground would be nothing soon.

"There is—little here for me anymore," Alucard explained. "I stay across the sea in Ameria. You wouldn't know of them—their nation formed while you slept. You may go back with me, if you will." And when Dracul did not answer: "There is someone there who will want to meet you."

"Who?"

"A librarian—of the 'Dracul Archive'—I think their collection would be interesting for you."

"I have an archive? Curated by men?" Dracul chuckled and sunk back on his throne. "I think I would like to see that."

"It is a sight. It used to be here, in the city, but it moved to D.O. before the calamity."

Alucard watched his father listen, to these names, these capitols and countries, these institutions, that did not exist when he was last awake in the world—what did his father think of the note of familiarity that must have slipped into his voice when he talked of these places?

"D.O.," Dracul said deliberately. "That is where you live?"

Alucard nodded.

"I will go—I want to see where you live."

— — —

 _I started writing this for three reasons:_

 _a.)_ _I really love the world-building in LoS, and I wanted to build off that and give the modern world of 'Castlevania City' its magic back. This is why I've changed some of the names, like Europe became Europa, for a stronger fantasy feel. I made America magic by dropping the 'c'._

 _b.)_ _Lords of Shadow needs more ladies._

 _c.)_ _It was Nanowrimo and Lords of Shadow had completely colonized my brain. I finished the 50k too! Thanks, Lords of Shadow!_

 _Records of the Prince is the parent project of my one-shot, The Apple Wood. I put that up in December and then spent two months editing the 80k I had. (During Nanowrimo, you spend a lot of your time writing utterly unneeded crap._ _K_ _I wrote 3,000 words where Dracul just walked to an office. I must have had no idea what to write that day.) I plan to post 8 to 12k (1 to 2 chapters) a week after those chunks get back from my beta reader. It is a frame story, so these early chapters are getting Plot A rolling before it branches into Plot B and Plot C._

 _Thank you for reading the prologue! You are my favorite reader!—Some Magician_


	2. The Screening

_Disclaimer: I do not own Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and I make no profit from this writing._

 _Warning: This chapter contains scary situations, violence, and very long lines._

 **Chapter 1—The Screening**

So, his son lived across the sea. It was no small sea either, no gray puddle, but a true sea, wide as the sky, deep as midnight, and they would fly over that sea to reach his son's city—'Washington, D.O.'

Alucard said the flight across the sea would take them a winter's night—nearly twelve hours. His son left him in the Old Cathedral, the morning lying like gilt on the Lieutenant's armor, to make their 'arrangements'. He promised to return after nightfall, and as Dracul waited through the day, he wondered at his son, the sorcerer—to fly across such a sea in twelve hours? How did he do it? Did he call a strong wind to ride as mist? Did he fly in a storm of bats, burning out the small creatures as he crossed? Dropping their spent bodies in the waves?

A roaring came up the silent street, with beams of light brightening the high windows of the church, before it came to idle—an engine. This city, even in its death silence, was still full of engines. They labored under the streets, between the walls, as somewhere deep in the church, some furnace thundered to life now and then. Throughout the day, the mechanical noise grew louder—sputtering motors veering down the street before racing into stillness while more motors groaned in the sky. The power wires hanging over the city streets crackled and coursed again—electric lamps, their bland light blazing over the candles, even in his cathedral.

These lights ticked dully above him.

' _It is this city coming back to life,_ ' Dracul thought. Throughout it, the survivors— _'there are always survivors, constant as vermin'_ —came out from their hiding places. Those survivors turned switches, opened frozen doors, and restored power—their efforts spreading a web of mechanical light over the old, dark foundations of his castle.

Perhaps, very soon, as the living worked, reclaiming their city, there wouldn't be anything here for _him_ anymore.

' _After so many years.'_

Perhaps, 'D.O.' was simply the only place left to go. Alucard must have found something there. In his traveling through the city the night before, Dracul heard it spoken of in electronic scraps of human voices—on 'radio'—on 'television'. 'D.O.' flew by on a screen for just a moment: a grand white city built on a field of green, the capitol of the United States of Ameria, ruled by a 'President' who sent her deep condolences for the loss of life from her white fortress in the Washington District of Ouroboros. His son's new land was named for its dragon of antiquity and had the elegant, eternal serpent cast in white stone all around the city limits in memorial: a pale Ouroboros to hang in the air over its highways.

In the video clip, one of that President's servants, the mayor of D.O., went on to say, "The City of Immortality weeps with all Europa."

' _The City of Immortality,'_ Dracul recalled. A heavy night settled on the city outside with rain. The engine rumbling in the street finally cut, but the lights endured. The doors of the Old Cathedral creaked open—

—And a man walked into Dracul's church.

His shoes were very shiny: his steps like bolts of light.

He was very tall and thin, his skin quietly pale, his dark coat spotted with fresh rain. He distracted himself with a cellphone: "I'm going back early." Its blue light glowed on his face as he balanced the phone with his shoulder and stripped off his leather gloves. His hair was long and black but carefully cut. He seemed unafraid, irreverent in the place—full of blissful, human stupid—the kind that gawked at demons—like they all had the night a dark lord had fallen into the crowded street below the Cathedral. Humans dumbly curious—humans unaware of the shadows at their backs, what wanted to eat them—

"Right," the man told his phone as he marched in among the pews. "Hang on—" He took the phone from his face and looked directly into the darkness, directly at Dracul—his eyes inhumanly blue for the cellphone—as he said: "Dad, the taxi's outside. We've only got about thirty minutes to get to the station. Ready?"

His son, the sorcerer, indeed.

The man returned to his phone, for farewells, and hung up. A change came over him as he pocketed the cellphone. He seemed to stiffen—unnaturally so. His features deadened, his great height suddenly unearthly and his human skin too—seamless. He seemed ill-contained in his modern clothes.

"I didn't recognize you like that," Dracul said.

"Good. It has taken me—time to perfect this," Alucard said, examining his hands—humanly pink, with flat nails. A stray, blue magic flickered among his fingers. "Humans change all the time."

"Are we still flying?"

"Yes, but first, we must travel by train. The airport here is—" Alucard frowned. "—still on fire. We will have to leave from Iris International instead—there will be an exit interview at the train station."

"Exit interview?"

Alucard nodded. "They are looking for Satan's stragglers—you will have to pass too."

— — —

Their taxi was one of hundreds clogging the roundabout beneath the Marble Lady's Station—the outgoing high-speed train station between the city of Wygol and the rest of Europa. The marble lady herself stood at the top of an arc of stairs, gazing heavenward with her wings open over the masses surging beneath her. She dripped from the storm, long, dry stretches on the stairs in the shadow of her wings. Trains came and went from the station on the hour, loaded with people—wounded families huddling together and broken pieces all alone, barely people anymore without their people. All escaping—now that it was finally safe to try.

Alucard tipped the auto-driver, it being a very personable robotic wheel who accepted fares and tips via a digital cashier-box with a scrolling 'Thank you for your business! '. Dracul and his son only had a bag and a briefcase between them—nothing more. As the taxi pulled away, they spoke beneath the hearing of the human crowd.

"We don't have time to teach you to pass," Alucard said. "Watch me, watch them. Do as they do." He paused as the nervous mass took them up, wrapped them in, and pressed them shoulder-to-shoulder with men, women, unhappy children. "And remember to breathe."

As quickly as the crowd tightened together to push through the station's doors, they forced apart again, flooding the concourse, massive and pillared, over the meditative face of the Marble Lady inlaid in the floor. She wore a crown of feathers etched in lines of brass in her hair. The crowds milled over her before they separated quietly into queues awaiting exit interviews—

—and patrolled by Golgoth Guards.

The familiar behemoths paced between the lines, dragging their grenade launchers. They wore uncharacteristically powder-blue armor stamped with a gray seal of the world and a pair of doves bearing laurels.

"Why are these here?" Dracul asked when Alucard returned to him with—coffee, apparently. He didn't drink it, but his son did. It was enough effort for Dracul to breathe in time with the others—rapid, useless movement, rapid, useless sound. "Are they really looking for Satan's stragglers with _Golgoth Guards_?"

"They also screen, in the exit interview," Alucard said. "Just one of these cost a couple hundred thousand to produce. There's quite the—aftermarket."

"Are the Guards the ones I must pass for?"

"Them, and the screening attendant."

"What do I do about the screening attendant?"

Alucard finished his coffee—far too fast. His son seemed almost—anxious.

"Be very, very polite," he said, tossing the paper cup away in a bin. They left the pillar they'd been shadowing behind and made for the lines. The Guards kept to their pacing, rumbling, as the station shook with their steps. Conversations stirred and froze with the seismic patrolling. A baby behind them wailed as the Guard passed. It paused to scope the crowd, disinterested in the sound, and lumbered on.

"I'm sorry, excuse me—excuse us," the young mother behind them said, rocking her baby.

"It's fine," Dracul said back. She didn't seem to hear him, caught up in soothing her infant's fussing. She hadn't looked at him when he spoke; she hadn't looked at him really at all.

But he felt Alucard glance back at the comment—and then away again—whatever that meant. The baby quieted, and they all seemed to recede into each other, a mottle of humanity.

Perhaps this was 'passing'? Not being seen, _really_.

Dracul looked down into the marble floor. It lay like a mirror under them, full of their shadows and their reflections—false reflections. He searched for a weakness in the illusions but there seemed none. They lay with all the other humans as if on the surface of a gray lake. His son's human look only rippled as it moved through seams in the blocks of marble—as human reflections did—

—As his did.

The interview lines moved steadily: every body rolling forward through the station with every step up as Dracul watched himself step along too in reflection on the floor, the little mother standing behind—

' _An old man.'_

—Middle-aged, brown hair and brown beard salting, blue eyes weathered, wearing rough clothes—damp jacket, common boots, dark denim pants. A hole in the line of bodies seemed to open around his unfamiliar reflection. After the longer look, it seemed very much like Trevor Belmont's father, standing there—

Except Alucard's clothes were fancier. He looked every part the metropolitan aristocrat—Zobek's kind of modern vampire, bloodsucking businessman—in a black bridge coat and slacks, the leather gloves, a green scarf over his shoulders. Their reflections meshed poorly—

"Oh, excuse me—" the little mother said.

He'd forgotten to step forward and did so at her small insisting.

"—Thank you."

And he nodded, feeling Alucard look back at him again. The lines ahead of them dwindled with systematic efficiency. The humans shuffled along to the tables ahead and then back into a makeshift row of curtained cubicles for their interviews and then—presumably—left for the platforms. The numbered names of the platforms seemed to hang strange and disused above the maze set up to process the fleeing. There were no departure times given. The screens that used to project such things were black, cold, and hung with a static banner, "TRAINS DEPART ON THE HOUR".

"Not much longer now," the little mother whispered to her baby as he fussed. "Not much!" Up ahead the line dissolved, and Alucard watched this carefully. He'd hardly spoken in line, giving up none of the small talk and little jokes humans passed back and forth around them. But he hung back suddenly and said:

"When you get to the interview, ask for the blood test. I will see you later." The family ahead of them made for the tables, and they followed. Alucard walked ahead, brisk and industrial, his humanness coming over him strongly as he stopped in front of the attendant and dropped his hands hard on his table, a small thunder in the murmur of the concourse.

"Excuse me. I have a question—why are we in this line? What precisely goes on during this 'exit interview'?" Alucard spoke in sharp challenge, the human startling at the abrasiveness.

"Sir, it's—uh—"

"My father has a heart condition—have any accommodations been made for health issues in this 'screening'? What is it for?" Alucard continued haughtily, as if the attendant hadn't tried to answer him. "I can't tell you what we've already been through—in those 'safety bunkers'—and now, now, we're forced into this—this cattle line?"

"The test—the test is very safe—" the attendant said, trying to respond to something in that slew of _comments_. The debacle began to draw eyes, with its spoiled, wealthy Amerian businessman versus the harried Europan government assistant, and another attendant tried to wave Dracul forward—and then waved again as his son continued:

"Look, I've had enough of this." Alucard stood up from the table, arms crossed. "Waive the screening right now before I miss my train. This is utterly unnecessary—" As Alucard leaned back, the attendant leaned forward. He wore a small white box with a button on his lanyard: he pressed it discreetly. Alucard did not appear to notice.

"Sir," Alucard's attendant said, finally with spine, "we absolutely cannot do that. Everyone, _everyone,_ must take the test. No one may board without—"

"Why? I don't understand—what are you screening for—"

"—Thank you for waiting, sir," Dracul's attendant said loudly over the argument at the next table. "Can I see your citizen's ID and passport?" Dracul produced these cards from a wallet in his back pocket. The wallet seemed to exist the moment he wanted for it, and the attendant flipped through them quickly. "Looks good—I've sent your details ahead to your screener—please go through the curtain to _your_ right—"

"I do not believe this—do you have _any_ idea who you're talking to—" Alucard's voice cut off with the fall of the green curtain, and despite its fabric walls, the interview cubicle was very quiet. It had a temporary table occupied by the screening attendant, a smiling young woman, and a single Golgoth Guard. The Guard adjusted its launcher at his approach and rumbled.

"Hello! My name is Sheridan," the smiling young woman said. "And this is Karen!" She gestured to the Golgoth Guard looming over her folding table (who, pardoning her blue color, looked no different from any Golgoth Guard patrolling the lines outside or the laboratory tunnels of Bioquimek). "Karen is a Class 5AAA Humanitarian Enforcer. She is a United Nations peacekeeping unit, and she is here to assist us with the exit interviews. You are in no danger, I promise."

' _Unless you are not human,'_ Dracul thought, hesitant, as Sheridan never stopped smiling. Alucard's parting advice echoed to him: _"Be very, very polite."_ He stepped forward and said with a nod to each 'woman':

"Karen—Sheridan—how do you?"

It was an old-fashioned greeting, and he realized it when Sheridan hesitated before she let her old smile die and put up a new one. 'Karen' issued the standard Golgoth growl while her breathing apparatus ejected a spurt of excess air. A sequence of lights lay across the body of her grenade launcher; at the moment, they were dark.

"I do well!" Sheridan said, indulging him. "Please sit, Mr. Wulf, please sit! Would you like me to call you 'John'?"

This was the name on his citizen's ID—John Wulf.

"Mr. Wulf will do." He sat in the folding chair before her.

"All right, Mr. Wulf—you have an interesting name!" she told him, the smile never dropping. "And welcome to the SP-screening! This will only take about ten–fifteen minutes of your time today. This is a brief health screening sponsored by the Metro Health Department for your safety and well-being." She reached forward across the table and touched his arm like a nurse as she said in a quieter voice: "It's possible you were exposed to unsafe, supernatural conditions during the calamity. While it's very unlikely you were corrupted, we want to take all precautions to contain the spread of any spiritual infection." He tried to keep indifferent as she told him this. She seemed to sincerely not want to alarm him, but spiritual corruption had not been a worry of his in a long time. "We have two testing options for you: a written test and a blood sampling test. The blood test will take about two and a half minutes to synthesize your results, while the written test takes as long as you need!"

" _Ask for the blood test."_

"Blood sampling—please."

"Coming right up!" Sheridan pulled a disposable blood-testing kit from a bin to her right and then snapped on a pair of blue surgical gloves. She took a small, plastic box from the kit. "Your non-dominant hand, please?" When he held out his hand, she cleaned his index finger with a wipe before she placed the little box carefully over the top of his finger—"Thank you! Now hold still, and try not move. This is going to sting a little."—and jabbed the box down, its interior needle slicing into him. Dracul did not wince; he hardly felt it. "Wow, you're so tough! These things make me so queasy," Sheridan said, taking the little box away and fitting it into a like-sized indent on the body of the disposable kit. A screen beside a row of solar battery cells flickered to life, a series of waves and bars processing the blood sample.

Meanwhile, the written tests sat nearby in a stack alongside a cup of pens—clean forms with three questions spaced evenly down each sheet below this heading:  
' _SATANIC PATHOLOGY SCREENING (Please print your answers)'_.

The first question was: _What is love?_

The second: _Is this true? 1 + 1 = 2 Explain why or why not._

And the third question: _What is something you are really good at? Please write about a time you truly excelled at this talent._

Dracul stared at the test: _'How in Hell do these questions detect demons?'_

"Just a couple minutes, and then, you're ready!" Sheridan reminded him as she left the kit and bandaged his finger. "There we go! If you like, you may check your cellphone while you wait."

"I—don't do that," Dracul told her. A weight in one of the pockets of his jeans told him he (probably) had one, but his experience with cellphones was—limited. Either way, Sheridan's face changed and not at all subtly. She beamed at him—as if she had found a kindred soul in a bleak place.

"Me either!" Sheridan smiled so bright, the bulbs behind her mega-watt smile trembled dangerously, her face barely containing her joy, as she leaned very forward. "I think—and I'm sorry—I just think it's so, so rude! I mean, you're trying to help someone, and they are just _staring_ at their phone the _whole_ time! But everyone does it these days—what can you do?"

"Yes," Dracul attempted. "My son does that—"

"Ugh! Isn't that the _worst?_ How old is he—because I have this colleague who is _surgically attached_ to his phone—it drives me _batty_ —and you kind-of look like—"

The blood sampling kit clicked—its readout screen full of bulky numbers.

"Excuse me!" Sheridan attended to the machine, taking its numbers down on a card. Then with a green stamp, she branded the card: "PASS". She stood from the table and gave Karen a little wave: the Guard thundered aside, the cubicle shaking with each step.

"And you passed! You're all good to go, Mr. Wulf! Make sure you hang onto this—these results are good for twenty-four hours. If you are leaving the country, you may be screened again if you lose this card." She handed him his card before she added gently: "Your iron levels are a little low though. Make sure your son takes you somewhere nice for dinner, okay?" She opened the curtain for him—the train platforms waiting. "It was nice meeting you! Buh-bye!"

Dracul walked through the curtain and heard the little mother walk in after him. Her little one's fussing announced her. Sheridan's super-watt smile redirected accordingly. "Hello! Can I get you a stroller?" The little mother answered barely, and Sheridan carried on: "Are you sure? Okay. Gosh, you have a serious cutie! What is your baby's name?" She dropped the curtain, and all sounds of the interviewing booth vanished. He stepped onto an empty platform gleaming with rain. A train had just left, the lights of its rear car vanishing down the track.

Dracul examined his card. Special Agent Sheridan O'Hill, of the Metro Department of Health, had declared him "HUMAN"—based on a blood test. He frowned at this: is that what humanity had been reduced to in these 'modern' times? A collection of chemicals?

"How did it go?" Alucard appeared at his side from the ticket lines.

"I passed," Dracul said, pocketing the card inside his jacket. "We missed that train."

"That doesn't matter," Alucard said, thumbing through a pair of high-speed train tickets and receipts. His "PASS" card was there as well. "I had to make certain you interviewed with Sheridan. Resisting the SP-screening—disrupted the line order."

"That—attendant—" Dracul's first word choice had been 'human'. "—pressed a white button when you spoke to him—"

"A panic button," Alucard said, stowing their tickets in his coat. "I must have frightened him." Dracul still frowned: pressing the 'panic button' did not seem to have meant anything—they both still passed the screening.

"How do these screenings find anything?" Dracul asked. "Their test said _I_ was human—"

"You are what you eat," Alucard reminded him. "The written test is better—"

"How? Those questions—"

"You haven't seen demons like humans do in a thousand years. It is—simple," his son said. They were mostly alone in the misty dark. The cold rain had driven passengers waiting for the train into coffee stands and warming shelters up and down the platform. "The first question lures them into a false security," Alucard began. "What _is_ love? Human delusion brought on by possessiveness, greed. Attachment in others to be exploited. What you put up with for free sex—whatever else the damned think love is for. After that, they decide they are—better than humans, better than the test. But the second question is more difficult: followers of the Father of Lies cannot conceptualize truth, let alone admit to one. They cannot explain why something, even something simple, is true—it goes too much against their nature. And the third question," Alucard paused, an elderly couple clinging dearly to one another walking by where he and his father hung against the station wall. "The third question finishes them," he continued when they passed. "A Child of Satan can never resist talking about how—magnanimous she is. She will go on and on—she may never even finish the test. She tells the screener exactly what she _really_ is—"

"Did you send me to Sheridan because you do not think I understand humans enough to pass their test?"

"Sheridan is a Pacifier. She is a very—" Alucard paused to find the word. "— _happy_ person. The Golgoth Guard relies on human reactions to alert it of—abnormalities, but a Pacifier is so _positive_ , it cannot read her accurately. If you interviewed with anyone but her, the Guard would have realized what you are—"

"You said many words, but you did not answer me—"

A ruckus down the platform in the interviewing booths interrupted him: the screech and clatter of broken metal, the flapping of tattered curtain, and two discharges of a shotgun—

A woman screamed—

—and the little mother stumbled out onto the platform, her front splattered in blood, a tremendous hole in her shoulder. She turned very slowly. Her eyes had broken into a dozen black, beady organs, an odd eye swelling in one of her nostrils, over the dangling remains of her jaw. Bits of her human teeth swam in her mouth as it sagged with seven tongues dripping neon saliva. A fat, fleshy tumor distorted her chest as it curled from her neck into her stomach.

She staggered at first, one of her arms hanging at a broken angle before she snapped it back and _ran_ —her legs blurring as they split into six serpentine limbs, carrying the failing human body fast along the platform. An infant face embedded in the tumor opened its mouth of pointed teeth, and screamed: the sound rattling every mortal on the platform, bringing them trembling to their knees.

Sheridan burst out of the remains of her booth, bleeding.

" _Everyone, please get down! Right now!"_

A break-action shotgun hung open over the crook of her arm, two spent casings ringing on the platform, as she hurried new shells into the barrel. She cracked the gun shut and shouted back into the booth:

" _Karen, absolutely END HER—please_!"

Before Sheridan lined up another shot, the Golgoth Guard exploded from the wrecked booth: every light of her launcher engaged. Karen fired, and the first blast vaporized the little mother's legs: dropping her suddenly and hard. She propped up on her arms and crawled, dragging her fried entrails as the tumor bawled. Her ribs shuddered inside her coat and ripped out, becoming spidery, bony limbs to pull the torso onward. Karen fired again, and the unholy crying stopped completely: the body collapsing in bone and ash. Sheridan stood panting, her clothes sprayed in neon demon blood. She let her gun hang in one hand and squeezed her eyes shut before she cried out:

"Gosh darn it! _I liked this jacket SO much!_ "

Sheridan sighed, and Karen trudged forward, the cement had cooked and blackened around the remains of the body. Her launcher's settings reconvened, changing canisters before it spat a pure blue flame over the mess: the black bones crackled and shriveled, the ash baking away, until the cement was clean and Karen put down a sign over the spot reading: "CHEMICAL EXORCISM COMPLETED ON 10/29/2059. TAKE CARE! Do NOT approach! Spirits ARE dangerous!" A graphic of a phantom clawing an unsuspecting stick figure illustrated the risk.

Her work done, Karen returned to her screening attendant, who whined as she reset the safety on her gun:

"It was brand new _too_ , Karen!"

"I am sorry, Ms. O'Hill," Karen said in the deep, graveling voice of all her kind. "The jacket had looked very nice on you."

"I know! Oh, oh! Ugh!" Sheridan took off her suit jacket in disgust and was making her way to a bin when she noticed them. She smiled again, resting the shotgun at her hip.

"Mr. Wulf! I'm so glad you're okay!" Her voice then went flat, nearly violent, her expression— _tense_. "That was a big, _big_ mess." She tossed her ruined jacket unceremoniously in the garbage bin in their corner.

"Are you—all right, Sheridan?" Dracul offered. With her here, the exit interview was on again, Pacifier or not, especially with Karen in tow and two Children of Satan dusted right in front of them.

"I'm in one piece!" Sheridan glared at the CHEMICAL EXORCISM sign. "She shouldn't have gotten this far, but she jumped me. Karen's not allowed to fire on unauthorized targets, and I'm extra unauthorized—" She stopped, the flatness still in her voice unnatural. "And I thought I knew your son. No 'hello', Adrian?"

"Hello, Sheridan," Alucard replied, very civil, as Sheridan gave him the disgusted look of someone who knew he only called when he wanted something. Her eyes became very icy; it was _almost_ frightening—but more worrying was the slow attention of Karen, drawn to the three of them as Sheridan's mood changed so darkly. The Guard's deep-set and cold mechanical eyes trembled. Alucard, evidently familiar with this look from Sheridan, told her she could expect 'acknowledgement' for her 'good work tonight' in forty-eight hours or so. "I am grateful to you. I know this was short notice."

"I better, and you're very welcome," Sheridan said, her disgust looking like it would finally stick to her before it was miraculously gone. Then, it was as if she only knew how to smile, and Karen looked out over the tracks—harmlessly.

"Anyway! I gotta get back to work now," Sheridan cooed, fixing her hair. "You two have a very good, very safe trip—have lots of fun wherever you're going—and stay out of trouble! No more demons, right?" She laughed a little at her own joke, and they laughed too, because her partner could _devastate_ them. "And Adrian, your dad's iron levels are low. You better take good care of him! He's old, y'know!" She winked. "Buh-bye!" With that, Sheridan turned round, waved, and was gone up the platform back to the interviewing booths.

The 'old' comment did not sit well with Dracul, but before he could speak, Alucard remarked, surprised, "Sheridan likes you. She can't stand me. At all."

"Perhaps you should turn off your phone."

— — —

 _I put Classic!Alucard and LoS!Alucard together in a blender because I wanted a very smart, mostly gentlemanly Alucard for this fic. (Sheridan's standards for cellphone etiquette are very high.) I'm not always sure I can land Trevorcard, but he is arrogant, isn't he, so maybe?_

 _I went with the name 'Adrian' because 'Trevor Wulf' sounded like a hot millionaire from a terrible romance novel. 'John Wulf' is for John Carradine, and a few other actors (also named John) who played Dracul in movies. Originally, I wanted to tip my hat to MercurySteam and use Gary Oldman, since they love Francis Ford Copolla's Dracul so much, but 'Gary Wulf' just did not sound right._

 _Thank you for reading chapter 1. You're my favorite reader. See you next week!—Some Magician_


	3. The Architect of Five Hundred Years

_Happy Saturday, favorite readers! Reviewer accolades, comments, and story notes are at the bottom of the chapter._

 **Chapter 2—The Architect of Five Hundred Years**

The flight did take a winter's night—on an airplane. Alucard knew his father must have had _other_ ideas of how they would cross the great sea to D.O., but he hadn't the heart to disappoint him. An airplane it would have to be. Magic had been more _alive_ in his father's old days. A High Witch or a God Eagle carried heroes across great seas back then.

But the God Eagles and the High Witches had gone—starved to death of human faith or hunted to extinction as heathens.

Now, there were only machines, which, thankfully, were not so easily damned— _'Yet,'_ Alucard thought, remaining a cynic.

And really, he and his father were not heroes, not so much anymore.

So, they took off just before dawn from IIA, Iris International Airport, an airdrome named for a spirit maiden long dead: the Old Goddess of rainbows, morning dew, and fast passages. It was very appropriately named, Alucard always thought, and the dead goddess's visage endured beautifully in her airport's interior design. She still ran along the moving walkways in brilliant light sculptures, trailing her veil of electric colors. Her crystalline hair, strung with beads of dew, survived in the pure white color of the atmospheric lighting as her laughter rang in tinkling pop music.

Though this did mean that the airport also looked like a massive, never-ending Apple Store, which Alucard had his own feelings about as an architect, but he left their bags in the care of a pearly luggage carousel anyhow.

When they finally departed, IIA lay below them like a lotus blossom with twenty-five petals opened for air traffic. It bloomed in the center of Europa, meeting highways and high-speed trains from all over the continent and aircrafts from all over the world. The coming morning turned it golden and pale: the slopes of its suspension roof glowing pinkly and departed Iris surely smiling on the complex built to her glory.

And so began their long winter's night: the twelve-hour flight to Washington, D.O.

It was utterly uneventful.

His father sat by the window, looking out onto clutches of cities and human activity humming along the ground until it thinned over the countryside and turned into sea. When the sun finally grew too bright and the ocean too dull, he pretended to sleep. His father learned quickly—watch them; do as they do.

Meanwhile, Alucard reread _Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture_ and _The Big Sleep_ through the blare of the plane's engines. He finished his third book, a very concerned exposé on interdimensional labor sharing by a journalist not terribly strong in physics _,_ just as the white ring of Ouroboros emerged from the mists over Washington, D.O.—holding the very heart of the United States of Ameria within its circle. The serpent lay scaled in granite and marble that winked in the afternoon light. It glittered beneath the plane as D.O. approached, and the dark dart of the aircraft reflected in the milky stone. Greater sorcerers than Alucard raised the monument into the air over the capitol centuries ago, when these lands had first declared their independence.

The founding warlocks decreed that their stone dragon would float over Washington, D.O., the City of Immortality, until Ameria—the Free, the Beautiful, the Eternal—fell. Then, too, would the white snake fall from the sky as dust.

Hopefully, he had not brought the dark conqueror who would fell the Washington White Snake right to it, on a commercial airliner, no less. _'If I am wrong, he will not get that far. I will not allow it. I am still everything my father is not.'_ He would continue to protect the world from him, and he always carried the ace with Crissaegrim. Even if he could not kill his father, he could put him down.

Alucard was still not sure bringing Dracul here would have ever been his ideal choice. It would have been better for all of them to die in Wygol. Zobek had prepared that city to host the great battle for centuries. For years, the Lord of the Dead had been playing the same, slow game as Alucard—with different pieces—a different board—a different ending. The game carried on without him now—only Alucard and his father left for players. But when it came to that, the United States was the only place left in the world ready with the firepower for such a holy war. The Capitol of the White Snake had power, now more than ever as the old powers in Wygol had departed one by one as Satan's moment approached.

They dispersed over the world, the city collapsing long before the Acolytes emerged from their hiding. Jobs evaporated, casting out the citizenry in droves, as the merchants took their shops and their merchandises overseas, closed their factories and warehouses, while the museums took their artifacts abroad and historians shuttered themselves in distant colleges as doctors left for far hospital complexes, leaving the Bioquimek-outfitted emergency rooms and pharmacies emptier day by day. Even the Dracul Archive, ancient resident of Wygol, abandoned its offices in the libraries at the Bradbury Building when invited to stay permanently in the United States National Library of Light and Shadow and took its every item, article, and librarian with it.

Only the very wealthy, the very prominent, remained—those who could stay barricaded in the towers, the penthouse prisons, Zobek had built to protect the elite collection of humanity he curated—for when he finally won the game.

Alucard himself left, but he had gone long before Wygol began to crumble, and had been staying in the US for just about fifty years. This wasn't long for him: this was still within the realm of only thinking about settling down in a place. If he was to live quietly among men, he learned he needed to _appear_ to die, so when the time came, and it always did, he took himself away. At first, he wandered Europa until he followed explorers on their ships across the sea and followed them back again to step off in a new port. Before D.O., he had been in Prague, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Sao Paulo, and countless others—cities with names; cities without. Advancements in automobiles and airplanes made his traveling ever swifter, and he roamed when wanderlust took him, going to the very top of the world and the very bottom, to pass the time.

And he'd had a lot of time to live in the world, to wait for 2059.

And he could not spend it all holding vigil at his father's grave.

At first, he had—as in folklore, he guarded: a white wolf watching over the stone coffin of a vampire lord, always, as he slept, and slept, and slept—lying like a dry corpse; Crissaegrim holding his heart still—as the years passed, and nothing came for him. No ghosts. No satanic messengers. No mad wolf men. No rotted magus. Nothing. No one.

Alucard began to build the Old Cathedral almost because he had little else to do, and he could no longer stand the ruins of his father's fortress. The fallen rooms of the Master Chambers and the Throne Room lay among the ancient rubble like the lost head of a giant. Day by day, as he guarded the body and stared into the rabble of rocks and ruin, the Great Church's design began to appear in his mind, like divine inspiration. The math unveiled itself to him like an incantation as he plotted his foundations, laying out his plans on reams of paper. He would cut and set the blocks himself if no one else came to the Old Castle—

—except the people came. The founding families came as destiny called them in the two hundred years before the official founding of Wygol, but from the beginning, the homeless, the hopeless came creeping in along the edges of the Dragon's blighted land. Slowly and every day, their caravans crept closer and closer. They came at first as pilgrims to the strange site of a grand house of God planned by a 'reclusive' architect, who worked alone from before dawn until long after nightfall. After they came, they settled and they began to build, their crawl of civilization blanketing the ruins of Castle Dracul. Alucard made better use of his endless time, his endless vigil, and slipped among them as a mason—a builder, a designer—in the brave, new city.

Alucard became a builder because his father needed a shelter, but he remained an architect because he found he was good at it. For centuries, he watched the Cathedral rise from barest stones, its turrets climbing higher and higher each year even as the changing styles pulled sections down and rebuilt them back. Three eras worked across the great church: its façade and buttresses gothic and dark, its stained glass work from the good, light-filled renaissance that followed the Dragon's defeat, and its arching halls very baroque. It sealed his father away, block by block, in an _unlikely_ house. Perhaps in the spirit of that unlikeliness, the cathedral became a curse to build and on those who built it. The work continued in defiance as the project killed workers, drank money, and destroyed resources with a black thirst all its own. In the beginning, it was the city's reason for being—a house of faith rising above the ruins of humanity's greatest tormentor. And when it was finished, its candles lit and its pews stocked with the praying—right under his sleeping father, who had sworn to be a thorn in God's side always—Alucard still had time. It was only 1699.

So, he built more buildings, raised more towers, killing his human alter egos and producing mysteriously identical heirs to his legacy from nowhere when the time was right. It had reached the point of absurdity when a student of his once—now grown and old, a master architect in his own right—pulled Alucard aside under his own arch, in his own great church, and said:

"I know you, apprentice. I know you're Master Wolfe—the man who taught me—looking just as you did the day you 'died'—twenty years ago. I care not what you are—welcome back to your work, sir." The old master taught the 'apprentice' all he missed in two decades before he himself died, as humans do, and Alucard returned to his work. Decade by decade, he filled the horizon of Wygol with spires, churches, and palaces—until there was hardly room for a star. A few of his greater works stood even now.

 _'_ _And the first structure I built stood longest,'_ he remembered. The Wygol architects to follow him had built right over his other works, raising the city higher, barring out the setting and rising sun with their buildings. It was the only city in the world that seemed to have a roof of darkness, no matter what time of day.

 _'_ _But I have always known how to build a good cathedral,'_ Alucard thought, having worked on two or three at this point, and the Old Cathedral had needed to be. It lasted and lasted, eerie in its endurance, as it stood against sky and fate. When a hellfire swept the city, it only blackened and smoked, choking on the flames like wet wood. When bombs fell on Wygol in world wars over a hundred years ago, it had only groaned and leaked in rainstorms.

It became apparent that the Cathedral had more than luck during those great wars. It had Castle Dracul in its foundations, in its heart, after all. Alucard returned to it immediately when word came of the blitzes, the firebombs raining down on the allied cities of Europa, and the Cathedral had not waited for him to restore it as it had before. He found gutted walls restacking themselves and shattered statuary reforming as the roof patched itself. The building had continued to grow quietly of its own devices while he was away. A bell tower he did not recall had sprung up like a weird, gothic weed along the northern wall. It glowed in the fiery night now, the hot lights of the _blitzkrieg_ on the new bell and the air full of sirens.

Haste made him unwise, and Alucard returned at a bad time—between air raids. The Great Church, the city, had already emptied, the people finding shelter underground as their homes burned, their buildings fell. An airstrike on the south wall of the Cathedral nearly knocked him to the ground as he moved carefully along the aisle to the altar.

There was fire so, so close. If not already in the Cathedral itself, it licked at the walls, but he needed to make certain that the Master Chambers suffered no damage. He insulated them, era by era, with thicker and thicker walls—for a human age, a human war just like this one. A threat so immense, so immediate he could not hope to hold it back as only one man. Alucard remained confident in his work, even now, but the Cathedral around him seemed to debate if it would stand for another night of firebombs. The walls and stones moaned, the bell towers murmuring distantly.

But it didn't matter if the rest of it fell so long as the Master Chambers stood. The Cathedral shook violently again, from the very foundations, a marble saint falling from his alcove and collapsing in dust.

 _'_ _If it falls, I will build it again,'_ Alucard resolved and stepped over the clutter of the saint. He made for the altar, and the hidden door into the deeper recesses of the Cathedral behind it. He judged his building as he went, and found it—wanting.

 _'_ _Four-hundred years at this and giving out over a couple of German missiles? I thought better of you!'_ Fiery light creeped on the windows, and he stepped up the runner with a vampire's briskness.

But when he reached the altar, a direct hit sank in the roof, surely wrecking the central tower and shattering every window. Ruined stone rained from the ceiling; stained glass windows reduced to their skeletal lines lit by flames. The head and body of a great stone monk from the roof crashed in front of the hidden door as it dragged flaming trusses down into the church—blocking his passage further and his passage back with fire.

"I will not act so hastily again," Alucard told himself. He stepped back in spite of the wall of rubble at his front and the wall of fire at his back, the heat brightening his face and him not human enough to sweat. The fallen wood cracked and collapsed, throwing up sparks and smoke, as a trapdoor appeared so suddenly in the shadow behind him he nearly tripped over its hinges.

With nowhere else to go, he crouched, lifted the door, and slipped down into a cool, dark mausoleum that had verily carved itself below the altar. Alucard had no memory of its planning; the small, intimate design wasn't his style, or that of any human architect who worked alongside him. It stretched in a garish corridor toward the church's closest, external wall. The hidden room seemed great and small at once, like the interior of a baroque coffin, its walls lined with close-set tombs shut with marble doors. The ceiling crawled with carvings—indistinct but still humanoid statues arched overhead, their faces turned from onlookers. Tiles crept ahead on the floor in an unfinished mosaic of a tree with dark branches snaking to a window at the very far end. This window lit a bench beneath it with a low, blue light, marbled by the thick glass, from a tunnel high above.

The tombs at either side of him seemed empty, their names scratched out—except for two: one bore his mother's name while another across from her said only 'Laura'.

This room also showed signs of passage, he realized, as if the length of the mausoleum had already been paced many times over many years, in spite of the new mahogany trapdoor and its brass hinges. But in light of _other_ modifications and repairs to the Cathedral in his absence, _'He must pace in his dreams here,'_ Alucard decided. He looked up from the worn floor at a change in the air, as if something settled on his shoulder, expecting his father's phantom—but saw nothing.

Perhaps, he was not supposed to be here in this particular place. Perhaps, the Cathedral only allowed him to find it because of the airstrikes. After all, it was safe and sturdy, just as much a bunker entombed under the Great Church as it was a mausoleum.

He sat at the bench to wait out the air raids, the Great Church still rocking above him. Within a moment, he heard the south wall be struck again and crumble with a roar. Dust powdered down between the seams of the trapdoor, while the planes flew low, their engines ripping the air—before they faded.

Meanwhile, the darkness hung all around, furring the edges of the room. Alucard sat and watched it closely, looking for even a rat creeping along the walls, and made a fist over his knee. Carmilla's Ruby pinching his fingers inside his gloves as he did.

It was no great stone, not anymore, but every one like it dismissed any fear of sunlight for the vampire wearing it. As the Vampire Lord of Shadow, Carmilla had many rubies, among them a ring encrusted with over three hundred red stones. To the victor went the spoils, and his father claimed her castle and dismantled her ring. Its largest stones were halved or quartered, and all the individuals reset in plain bands and distributed to his lieutenants: for at least three hundred vampires impervious to sunlight.

His father was nothing if not a very practical man of war.

Alucard himself had found his ring in a pocket of the great, emerald coat he had been entombed in, some days after his—return to the world. Wearing it certainly eased the burdens of traveling, but firebombs had come somewhat _after_ the great vampire sorceress's time. Her remedies for weaponized fire were meager, and if the flames ate through the stone, he would have to move—somehow.

But for now, he waited, feeling the fire still far off, and slipped off his glove to examine his ring. It winked even in dull light. It was finer than any other of Carmilla's Rubies he had ever seen: the stone flawless and bright, the band braided from gold and silver. But he was Alucard—son of the Prince of Darkness—could his ring be plain?

"I have never thanked you for this," Alucard said aloud. He knew this darkness listened, even if it wouldn't give up its listener. "It saved me many times. I'm grateful."

Nothing answered, nothing stirred, but for Alucard as he shifted back on the bench. He leaned against the blue glass, its light icy on his skin and hair. It lit the metal brightness of his coat buttons, his ring, like moonlight.

"This is a good room. I like it. Less is a bore," he said to the darkness before he sat upright and serious again. "But I would remind you: you are meant to be a _church_ , father."

Still, nothing answered. There were no creaks, no ghosts' whispers. Alucard replaced his glove and slipped back into waiting as despite the firebombs, the mausoleum simply grew colder. Frost laced the window, eating in the seams. It had quieted up above when Alucard rose from the bench, sensing morning approach. He decided to leave at last, the long arm of the blue light following him, stronger for the dawn, as he checked the surface of the trapdoor—cold, very cold, and silent. He pushed up on the door and it resisted—as if debris or something else sealed it shut.

"Thank you for letting me into this place," Alucard said as he gave the door another shove, "but I cannot stay—" He swore something tall and dark cut through the blurry, blue light at the edge of his vision. "—I must go—" The door swung up and fell back unhindered. Already, the Cathedral healed itself. A patch of pale sky in the roof knitted shut as he hopped clear, the trapdoor falling down with a heavy clatter. The lock jammed and broke from it, and the door refused to open—nor did he ever find it again after that morning. No spell he tried retrieved it either. The floor behind the altar was forever uninterrupted wood.

At the time, Alucard hoped this activity meant Satan's moment was soon and the Old Cathedral's interest in spreading itself meant his father too might be stirring in anticipation of his part in the plan. Perhaps Dracul's dreams were more aware of the tensions of Heaven, Hell, and Zobek than Alucard could know, and he had his suspicions about the Führer. He had lived long enough to know humans too could work unthinkable evil, but the man spoke so electrifyingly. Too many flocked to him, drawn by the seizing power of his speeches spreading fast and far on radio airwaves, and too many bowed, permitting him to take their countries, their neighbors, if he might ignore their own lives. Alucard kept his faith in humanity in hoping that such a man _must be_ an Acolyte. Surely, the world created by such a man was dark enough now, chaotic enough. Surely, Satan could not stay in Hell and ignore the call of this suffering, the heat of these fires any longer.

But again, nothing came.

That Führer fell, shot himself in his own bunker as his enemies finally closed around him. The world steadied and then flopped in and out of idleness over the decades. Alucard's faith in humanity tarnished as the Cold War lingered, leaving him wondering why he bothered if humankind intended to vaporize themselves before Satan set foot on the field. But the Berlin Wall fell, years passed, and new tensions came to pick away at peace. All the while, the neighborhood around the Cathedral rose and fell, fell and rose. No creep of industry could persuade the Great Church to move from where it had always been. As corporations squeezed it, it pushed back, shoving them along the river into what would become the Sciences District, but the Arts alone it permitted to crowd it. So, the unfinished warehouses and cleared lots resurrected as a clutch of theatres, galleries, and countless clubs in its shadow.

Though these too would hollow and darken, and still, it would be only 1999. Always, Alucard remained on the slow path to a battle in a year he knew not when. Satan could come at any time. The King of Hell needed only to feel sure enough that a world that had gone five hundred years without Dracul was truly rid of him.

So, again and again, Alucard always found himself with time—unfathomable time.

And in light of recent events, he was going to have a lot of time more.

Alucard moved stiffly as he disembarked from their plane, his father following him through the gates, under the welcoming banners of the United States, and onto the concourse where his father paused _hard_. Airport security coursed below them: processing flyers in and out of the country. Plastic bins full of their belongings and electronics glided through x-ray machines as security personnel asked after the buckles of their belts or any surgical metal in their bodies—

—and a Golgoth Guard observed as it inhaled and hissed, gun at ready.

These Guards were armored in marine blue and white with red helms and the flag of the United States stamped on their arms and their backs. They were posted at every security terminal, and further out, they flanked the doors to Departures, and beyond the airport, they only thickened—spreading all over the city, as if a Golgoth Guard manned every street corner. Their cloying presence pressed out only by the hundreds of thousands of humans walking right around them.

"Oh, God," Dracul said with a flat horror as he spoke His name with the utmost vanity. "What torture parlor have you brought me to?"

"Reagan Washington National," Alucard said.

"Why are there Golgoth Guards—everywhere."

"Because this is Ameria. Land of the Fifty States, McDonalds, Golgoth Guards—and Fox News."

"What do you mean?"

Alucard's first response was too curt, but he managed a tempered "May we talk about it later?" instead.

He was growing annoyed, but in a way he could not describe to himself.

 _'_ _I am tired of traveling,_ ' he realized, knowing he did earnestly want to go home and be at ease in his own place, but they could not—not yet. He had to call the Archive, and knowing the Dracul Archive as he did, its librarian might wish to meet for an appointment at once. If they did not go when the Archive agreed to host them, they might never do so again. The librarian in particular had a clear cause for fickleness against him—which made him sigh.

 _'_ _I cannot think of this now.'_

Alucard headed down to the luggage carousels, ignoring how his joints creaked with every step. He always felt stiff after traveling: as if his body when too still simply resumed being dead.

Perhaps that was how Dracul had sat in that throne for over a year after Zobek came to ask for his aid. His father's minutes collected into hours; his hours into days. His once human body, continuing to live against reason—settled deeper and deeper—sleeping without sleep and rotting without blood—and then, just—why get up?

His father always bowed to fate before; why not bow to nature? A dead body is dead.

 _'_ _And he is still following me,'_ Alucard thought as they waited for their baggage in silence. _'He does not even know where I am taking him. He did not know where Trevor was leading him either—he never asked._

 _How does he stand such obedience? Is he not the Prince of Darkness?'_

Perhaps less so now—less so than he had been anyhow. While his father had griped a little over the age of the disguise Alucard had made for him, he had not griped, not openly, that he now wore the shape of Gabriel Belmont. Gabriel Belmont pieced together from Trevor's dreams, his mother's memories, and then allowed to age some twenty years, as human fathers did when their sons aged twenty years too.

But Alucard frowned, staring almost cruelly into the floor.

 _'_ _All someone has to do is offer him a voice of fate,'_ like time, like family, like death, _'And he does whatever is asked of him—'_

His father spotted their bags before he did and set the strap of the suitcase over one shoulder before he offered his son the briefcase. Alucard shook off his malaise again— _'I must move past this.'_

"Thank you," he said, taking the briefcase. They walked past windows where October grayness had overtaken the sky—D.O. anticipating vampires.

There was only the sound of footsteps up and down the concourse hall, the footsteps of hundreds of travelers set alone in their paths, alone in spite of hundreds of other humans around them, until his father struck up:

"What made you decide to live here?"

Alucard grinned—for the first time, in over fifteen hours.

"The _challenge_ ," Alucard said, still grinning. He stood taller, head higher, the spring of pride in his step. "They are—anxious here, more anxious than anywhere in the world. If I can pass in Ameria, I can pass anywhere."

"This land keeps you sharp?" his father asked, and Alucard nodded before his face fell.

"And I don't _live_ here, I stay here," he said. "Anyhow, I have to make a call—to the Archive—" Dracul only grunted as they left Departures for the very gray, very cold afternoon, his father's not-a-word leaving Alucard—off his guard. He would call anyway—right now—

"What is the hurry, Adrian?" Dracul asked suddenly when his son was half-way into dialing—the name catching awkwardly when his father used it for all the humans rushing around. "I did want to see where you stay."

"They will call me, if I don't call them," was all Alucard wanted to say on _that_ matter as his father looked away across the lanes.

"I think they have," Dracul said, his own stare hard as his voice deepened. "That one is staring."

A woman stood across the lanes, a woman with a black car—waiting. She stood very straight, and still, and thin, and dressed all in militant black but for a brightly red scarf. Her coat, too, was black and her hands were in her pockets. Her hair was dull, rust-colored, and cut hard at her chin. She looked ahead, always—perhaps at them, perhaps at no one—as the wind of cars and buses rushing through the airport fluttered her hair, tousled her scarf. Her stare, her presence, was always heavy, always intent; she unnerved the humans around her. People on the walkway stepped away from her, skirting traffic as they crept behind her or crossed streets to avoid passing through her stare.

Because the woman across the lanes had no face, no eyes—only a dark hole on her narrow shoulders—from the black, featureless mask she wore that hid her completely.

The woman's head appeared to move when Alucard looked at her across the Departures lanes, but still, she waited—the black car with her waiting too—inevitable as a funerary carriage.

"Yes, they have," Alucard said finally and with strange resignation. "Her presence is not a—standing appointment. If we don't go to her now, we might never have the chance again."

"Then we go."

Dracul did not relish riding in a machine again, almost thirty hours across so many different machines had left him—sleepy, but he let his son take him across the streets to the faceless woman, who expected them. She shook hands with both of them, gently, her grip cool and dry as she cupped her free hand over the grasp for each greeting.

But she did not speak, nor even introduce herself, as the passenger door of her car opened unbidden. She slipped inside first: her soundlessness exaggerated the mechanical noise of the vehicle. The mundane and barely sounds—leather seats squeaking, engine purring, the auto-driver at work—made defeating.

The black seats inside wrapped in a long U around a bar, and the envoy of the Dracul Archive sat to the far end of the car and waited as Alucard joined her. Dracul sat last, the passenger door pulling shut with a soft clip after him. A strip of gentle lighting activated overhead as the doors locked and the windows darkened, but in spite of the lights, the woman's mask still ruled—formless and dark, a blackened mirror. The mask in fact dominated the cabin, however simple its shape, blank its expression, slight its wearer. It swallowed all light, all sound. It became hard to recall that the woman beneath the mask was a woman at all.

The car rolled from the curb as the afternoon chilled deeper, October sharpening into November with a clutch of dark clouds uncurling on the horizon.

"Madam," Alucard began, "could you please explain to my father who you are?"

The mask looked at Dracul.

"I am the Dracul Librarian," she said. "I am bound by the Mark of Holy Silence, and I may only answer questions." The gaze behind the mask seemed to burn past it—coldly. "I serve humanity. My knowledge is forbidden. I have no name, but you may call me 'ma'am'." Her voice was firm at this. "We will be at the National Library soon."

— — —

 _Hello again—thank you for reading, favorite reader! I love seeing you!_

 _I had a chat with my Beta, and I've decided to hold ch. 3 back for revisions. It will be up next Saturday with chapter 4. As I mentioned before, Records' storyline is a plot with nested stories—so, it has a frame story, this modern-era Plot A, that will dip into stories from Dracul's colorful past—Plots B and C—and Alucard's flashbacks on what he's been up to during his long life. Dracul, because he's a sweet narrator, will announce his plot shifts, but Alucard does not care and expects us to be quiet and listen to him flashback, as he did in this chapter. If we complain, he will turn the chapter around and nobody'll have any story._

 _Thank you to Creepy Mae West Kozi, Dariel Rey, Lilithrin, Nightshade07, Orionali, and Verona-mira for favoriting this story. I'm honored, and you're all fabulous humans. Extra special thanks also to Dariel Rey, Creepy Mae West Kozi, Lyra (I've left a note for you in my P.S.), and TatteredSeraphim who left me reviews. Your words are welcome and encouraging, and I am so grateful to you all for taking the time to write to me! I appreciate your words so much!_

 _Again, thank you! See you all next Saturday!—SM_

 _P.S.—Hi Lyra! Thank you so much for telling me this. I've thought very carefully about your feedback, and I commiserate with you. I want to be clear that America and 'Ameria' are intentionally the same because Ameria is a low-key satire of the US. I wanted to poke a bit of fun at my country. I also wanted to write a little alternate history because it's fun._

 _More than anything, I wrote Records with an immigrant journey in mind, because Dracula, the novel, has always been an immigrant journey where the Count travels to England. Now, the novel plays on British anti-immigrant fears, and I wanted to write without those fears. While this did inspire me, I think Dracula going to the UK has been done to death. I've read, watched, and listened to lots of Dracula adaptations, and D.C. is a change I like._

 _If you feel I've misunderstood your feedback, please PM me. I'm happy to discuss over PM. I hope you'll keep reading the story as I think it'll surprise you. Again, thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback, and I'm grateful you've read this far!_


	4. The Masked Librarian

_Disclaimer: I do not own Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, but if it is not familiar, it's mine. I make no profit from publishing this story. This story contains lines from 'Scarborough Fair,' a Scottish ballad from the 1600s now in the public domain._

 _Hello, favorite reader. It's good to see you! I want to thank those who favorite'd (Kars) and reviewed (Nightshade07 and Creepy Mae West Kozi) from the bottom of my heart for your support, and thank those who continue to visit and read quietly. I'm a sociology minor, so climbing bars in viewer activity graphs make my day. I love all of you. I hope you continue to come back!_

 _These next chapters thrive on how much I love to write characters yelling at each other. There is only a little family violence in Ch. 3, while Ch. 4 just…has goals._

 **Chapter 3—The Masked Librarian**

He had an archive—curated by men—and this masked woman. Dracul knew she was human and woman: she, softly breathing with the flash of an artery along her throat. She shifted: putting ankles together, hands in her lap. Hers was the constant motion of the living—except for the stillness of her mask. All her humanness fell away in the presence of that mask. Alucard—stiff, collected—seemed infinitely more alive beside her. With the mask on, her movements appeared only awkward—as if it were really she attempting to pass for human.

She was unnatural but not unlovely, despite the stark absence of her face. His eyes came to her neck, pulled by habit and residual hungers, and the marking above her collar—a tattooed braiding of gothic letters: _SIGNUM SANCTAE SILENTIUM_.

But her silence dictated their silence, and no one spoke during the ride. Alucard sat very still, very focused, as if in deep discussion—with the empty decanter on the bar. Dracul willed the time along as he looked away from the other riders and out the window where a terrific, marble spike jutted from the heart of the city, the Washington Monument. It held the stone Ouroboros aloft in the sky, and the great snake revolved the obelisk's point slowly, appearing to devour its own body by the hour. The uniformity of the highway soon broke for D.O. itself, a polished city of white stone, crowning domes, and soaring columns. The car swept along from the wheel of a roundabout before it turned a corner into a canyon of memorials and parliamentary castles with statues of Amerian warriors and rulers set atop their stairs. Banners hung between their pillars, and people—their bodies thick as an army under his gate—milled beneath them.

If Dracul listened, he heard only a cacophony of human hearts thundering. They hammered through the car, through his head. Such thunder was in Wygol too, every day, every night. In five hundred years, humans learned never to sleep. Their hearts were everywhere, hearts roaring with blood enough for oceans, until the night he left his sanctuary and so many of those hearts silenced at once. Wygol had been larger than this Amerian city, as Washington, D.O. was apparently 'small', a mere seven-hundred thousand souls. His city had boasted over ten million people, ten million people walking over his grave.

Before Satan drew and quartered them.

But still, those left lived there; still, those left stayed.

For now, he let them have it. The city was just a shell, and if it was anything more, if something still haunted the Wygol skyscrapers, he did not want it—not now. _'I will see where Alucard lives,'_ Dracul resolved again, _'I will see if this—can be done.'_ If he could have peace in this world as his son seemed to, or if he only prolonged an inevitable return to 'home', an inevitable _disappointment_ — _'I will see how Alucard does it.'_

Washington, D.O. flickered grayly by. The car passed through the shadow of the Washington White Snake, its body curving overhead like a cloud.

 _'_ _Alucard 'stays' here,'_ Dracul thought. _'In this city.'_ But what did he mean by 'stay'? Was he only being precise? (Did the dead 'live' anywhere?)

His son, the sorcerer, who was always so precise. Even as Dracul's memory still throbbed with the empty holes cut by Crissaegrim, everything had been as Alucard said it would be; everything always was. His son even knew where Satan would set foot on earth again. Alucard fought like a surgeon, his carriage always measured and controlled, from the fine cuts of his sword to the calling of his spells. The very silent way he slit the throats of foes.

They seemed so unlike each other, and they had been so unlike each other for a long time. His gaze was drawn out the dim window again, to the city's sprawl, as the part of Dracul that was a conqueror yet knew that if his son had taken his side a thousand years ago, _'There would be no cities.'_ No Wygol, no Washington—could even God have stopped them? Satan certainly hadn't had any luck.

But Alucard refused him, and Simon Belmont put him in his grave. After that blow, he had had no mind, no body, only the shattering of his soul's particles, which lay adrift between being and nothingness—dreaming nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing—for years until he awoke again in flesh, naked and coated in dust, in the castle. Alone.

Because Alucard didn't _understand_ , wouldn't _understand_. Even then, they were too different, and even now, centuries later, his resentment, his betrayal still welled so quickly, still so strong—

But that was past now, wasn't it? This day, this city, was new. He had lost so much of the past in his long sleep, and much of it to be glad for, but his memories returned in fits. A burst now and then in his heart startled into humanity again, its fits of anger, grief—and fear—

His son was not always so _estranged_ as this; before, they had always fought. Alucard did not come to the castle, but if Dracul went wandering, he appeared, particularly if he went seeking Belmonts. He had been of the mind to find and kill them for a spell, when his immortality was all he had. One night in summer, he followed the scent of his own's blood to a cottage in the woods where old trees whispered in a night sleepy with crickets. The smoke of his family's hearth floated among boughs wooly as spiders' legs, and his son clattered down from the trees onto the roof. Where Trevor pitied, Alucard _raged_ , and he crouched low on the roof, seething. He still carried a battle cross then, the infernal contraption he found in the castle.

"Fight me for this house, father," Alucard commanded, "and the lives within it! My great granddaughter lives here—and her son! Fight me for them!"

At that, Dracul pulled back and into the trees, even as Alucard leapt from the roof and pursued.

" _Coward!_ " he shouted, and Dracul stopped. The crickets stopped, even the littlest lives quitting the woods.

"What did you say?"

"I called you 'coward'—what do you think I said?"

Dracul flew back, caught Alucard by the collar, and slammed him against a tree, splitting the trunk and scattering bark.

" _I killed the Lords of Shadow, you ingrate!_ " he growled. " _I put down the King of Hell! I murdered the Forgotten One—Alone! No one came to fight with me!_ "

Alucard slipped from his grasp, nothing more than a white blur, fur and mist streaming through Dracul's fingers, as the white wolf slid through the high grass. It ran so silently, becoming the flicker of golden eyes, the moonlight stroking white hackles. Whenever he caught sight of it, the wolf sped on, darting to his blind spots, until the grasses rustled and the beast leapt from behind. It came down heavy against Dracul's exposed back, its mouth on his neck, as it drove him against the shattered tree. Before the jaw closed, the wolf became Alucard again, as naturally as ice falls as water, who pushed the point of his cross between his shoulders.

"And look what you've done with your 'heroism'—given them a greater dark lord! Stalked your own family, _my_ own family! To murder them! _Coward!_ " Alucard loosed the chain from the battle cross and noosed it around Dracul's neck. He held it slack. "This is the last time you turn your back to me, father; this is the last time you treat me as separate from them," Alucard said and tightened the chain enough to cut the spiked links through flesh. "Don't dare come this way again, and don't dare touch mine, or you will have to kill me again." He jerked the chain free, leaving Dracul's throat too mutilated for the moment to speak, and dropped him. "Go. Now."

He had healed; his voice returning after his shredded throat drew back together. He healed seamlessly as he always did, even if he might have wanted for the scars. The cut between his ribs by Crissaegrim—which lay in him for five hundred years—left no mark. If he had wounds, they creaked without scars: he felt his betrayal so strongly, by God, by family, even as he knew he didn't deserve it. His exile from warmth, from humanity, had been earned, justly. That he could be in this foreign city, this foreign time, riding in this machine with his son, seemed some kind of dream—a brighter dream that he was used to, though a dream nonetheless, but, as he watched the woman, Dracul was no stranger to dreams with ghosts. If this 'Dracul Librarian' knew he stared, she gave no word or side-glance from under the mask.

He kept watch on her, and it prickled to look at her closely, like needles lifting the underside of his skin. The black mask lay on her face like skin but contoured to no feature. She was too human to seem so inhuman—and this creature guarded his archive? A woman without a face, without a name. What did she keep in the Archive? What did humankind collect there? Rotting books? Scraps of Brotherhood scrolls? The garbage of history? What human ever lived to escape him and his fortress with his secrets?

The wonders of the city flew by, and still, no one spoke, no one commented. The others' silence ate at him. This silence was unlike any he endured before, and Dracul knew silences. Decades passed in his throne room without a human word, but this silence in the Librarian's black car buzzed. It pressed on his ears like whispers leaked from a somber conversation in a locked room. He felt _discussed_ by it but could not tell why.

Then, as sudden as it started, the car stopped, the single passenger door springing open. The National Library rose high above them, and the lowly curbside, on a throne of curving stairs with a fountain of three muses between them—Calliope, Clio, and Erato reclining in the study of their inspirations. Spotlights lit the statues red and golden as evening neared, and the marble arch over their fountain bore the library's motto: _AB UNO DISCE OMNES._

 _'_ _From one learn all,'_ Dracul thought as he translated one of the first familiar things he encountered in this Amerian land. The Librarian guided them up the stairs with a gesture.

Golgoth Guards, sashed in the library's colors, were posted at the tops of the stairs, their forms hideous and taking away from the architecture, because _'Amerians must have something mighty to fear,'_ Dracul decided. He did not know what—the calm of the city, the age and excellence of its buildings, suggested they hadn't seen war on their shores in some time. Satan, with his eye weighing on Wygol, perhaps hadn't moved on this place—or perhaps they were already docile, trusting their protection to Satanic manufactures. Zobek had said that the Acolytes ruled all from the shadows.

The library stairs met a formal entryway with seven revolving doors and a massive entrance hall beyond those with staircases in each cardinal direction to take the Library's visitors elsewhere. A mezzanine ran all around the great room above a tremendous statue of a Grand Librarian in ponderous robes and holding a staff bannered with _SERVIO SCIENTIAM_ in one hand and three books, _CURIOSITAS_ , _IUSTITIA_ , and _OPSEQUIUM_ , with the other. This figure stood in the center of a wide circle of mosaic with a low fence as he gazed down heavily on a dark, bronze book leaned against the base of his monument. This metal book was almost as tall as a man standing and open for reading with bright lengths of chain hung at each side. A strange Y-shape of shiny tarnish crossed the lines of Latin engraved on its pages—which, though tiny and tight, read: _EGO_ , _INSIMULATI_ — _'I, accused of—'_

The Librarian cleared her throat, calling them forward and away from the statue. She walked ahead of them through another set of doors onto a balcony looking out over the library itself. When they joined her, she turned and bowed with her arms open.

"Welcome to the United States National Library of Light and Shadow," Alucard said duly. His words refreshing in all this _silence_.

And it was a library. Dracul had had better, but it was, indeed, a library. The National Library of Light and Shadow rose four floors high in great balconies circling an atrium. Light fell from a paneled dome overhead and onto a mosaic where a winged, golden lion, the sun in its jaws and its back studded with lesser stars, raided a nest of black serpents guarding the eggs of the moon and stars in their coils. Shadow rose in the shelves behind the nine pillars that supported the dome. Each pillar was set with alcoves for the frowning busts of great Amerian presidents and politicians that were also sorcerers elected to public office.

From the balconies over the mosaic, the shelves branched in all directions: their paths orderly arrays before they veered off into collections of mystic biology, occult history, hermetic astronomy, and dark physics—books for bliss, dissertations for damnation, and sections on the afterlife shuttered and locked. On these shelves, scrolls lay stacked alongside heavy books: some intact, bound in their original leathers, while other crumbling volumes had been rebound in simple, generic covers. Only their titles bequeathed their secrets, their knowledge: the Books of Honorius and the Red Dragon, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, the Hermaphrodite Child of the Sun and Moon, and the Book of Thoth—

"Twenty-second edition," the Librarian said very quietly to her guests after Alucard prompted her with the appropriate question. They stood beneath one of many lamps hanging among the shelves. Only she touched the books and did so with black gloves. The Book of Thoth nearly swallowed her arms with its heavy cover and vast pages crammed with text. Explosively decorated letters ruptured the tight lines as she turned a few of the great pages. Having shown off the National Library to its fullest, she shut the huge book and returned it to its place on the shelves.

Alucard seemed impressed or at least mannered: silent, listening.

Dracul, however, was beginning to feel peckish, and peckishness did not give him any patience for old books.

Especially when none of the old books were about him. He had come all this way, on planes, trains, and robotically-driven automobiles, to see an archive about him.

Which begged his question: "Why are we waiting?"

"We are ready now. Follow me," was all the mask said. She did not speak again and took them through a break in the stacks out to the atrium: they were on the third floor. The serpents writhed below, locked in art. Where their balcony met one of the nine pillars hoisting up the library, the Librarian revealed a staircase and led them down—past the books, the scrolls, to the lowermost floor, where a dark carpet surrounded the bright circle of the atrium mosaic. As they clattered down the metal steps behind her, Dracul especially, the Librarian made not a sound, even as she left the last step and followed a trail of red rug threading back into the stacks, where the library grew dark.

The Librarian led them on this looping path through the soft library dark, the fog of words and study. The line of red rug thickened as it bent through the shelves, alcoves set in their ends with hooded angels contemplating hallowed scripts and penning hallowed verses. The last angel of the shelves stood unhooded against a bookcase of incantation dictionaries, one of his wings battered. He carried a lantern and a sword, and he glared ahead with heavenly resolve into the open maw of a red dragon carved in a door across from him. The red door seemed small until the Librarian approached it, and the dragon loomed over her, its mouth huge, its gullet deep. Its eyes seemed to cross and stare down on whoever it beheld. It, too, held a sword in one claw and a stone cup in the other. An inscription ran along the arch above it:

BEYOND MY DOOR LIES THE DRACUL ARCHIVE.

ACCOMPANIMENT BY STAFF IS REQUIRED FOR

ALL GUESTS OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY.

PLEASE USE THE BELL TO CALL FOR ASSISTANCE.

This message was perhaps not as majestic as the gateway itself. The call bell hung from the wall, silver and dusty, at the dragon's sword claw, but the Librarian did not touch it. She peeled off one of her gloves, and a rune made of red light opened in the center of her palm and conjured a long, slender knife. The blade waited, afloat in the air, until she took it and pricked her index finger, a bead of blood welling. With her thumb, she pressed her injured finger until the wound swelled over the stone cup, and three drops of blood dotted the basin.

The dragon's eyes moved: sliding, with a gravely sound, to life and then swiftly to the Librarian—and the two behind her.

"Who goes with you into the Archive, Librarian?"

"My guests," she said.

"Worthy guests?" asked the red dragon. It pulled its stone cup close, as if its librarian's blood might be stolen. It curled up and rose higher above them, the shadow of its head and horns darkening the inscription.

"Worthy," the Librarian assured it. "They could read the words in the Book of Thoth."

"The Book of Thoth remembers all hearts that read it," said the dragon. "Very well, madam. I accept your test of trust. You, and a second guest, may pass. The third guest may not pass." It uncurled its head until it looked the Librarian in the eyes and blinked. "On advisement from the Capitol Fire Council. Until the Archive can be renovated to meet municipal fire code—" The dragon flapped its stone wings. "—no more than two are allowed inside. For your future needs, the Archival rooms will be closed from the 1th day of the eleventh month in the year of our Heavenly Lord, two-thousand and fifty-nine, until the 11th day following, for these modifications. Renovations will be completed promptly on the 17th." The dragon recited this stonily, no more vivid than an archaic "Pardon Our Dust" sign—and possibly three times as long.

"It is—a fire hazard," Alucard said blankly.

"In this noble republic of the United States, aye," the dragon acknowledged before it repeated: "No more than two." He met the Librarian again. "Now, choose."

Alucard and the Librarian exchanged looks.

"We agreed," Alucard said, turning from her. "I'll wait here."

Dracul's ears pricked to hear this: when had they agreed to any such thing? The Librarian hadn't spoken of her own will—and Alucard hadn't questioned her—and they hadn't left him _once_ —

Meanwhile, the dragon leapt to attention.

"Then, the Dracul Archive at the National Library of Light and Shadow is open to you!" It lapped its stone tongue around the bowl of its cup before clutching the goblet fiercely and leaping up to the top of the archway. It coiled there, its body and wings bent low atop the door. "Go. I await your return." The dragon stiffened, the unnatural life leaving its eyes as the Librarian produced a key on a cord from around her neck. She fitted it into a black lock in the center of the unguarded door. The black lock reached out from the door, an embossed mouth lined with teeth. It drew back with a hiss as she turned the key and opened the red door onto a set of worn stairs, falling into shallow blackness, a faint halo of light on the very last stair.

The Librarian seemed to look back at Alucard and then set off down the stairs alone, but before Dracul could follow, Alucard took his arm.

"Do not dare it," he said, firm and low. "I can do little about this timing, but if the Librarian comes to harm in the Archive, it will never open again. Do _not_ dare it."

"I dare nothing," Dracul told him, pulling away. He finally followed, and once he passed under the archway, the door flew shut and the stone dragon crashed down, sealing the archive behind them. A calm darkness fell but for the stairs outlined just so and the Librarian waiting on the landing, surrounded by the enduring blue light. She held herself carefully, and Dracul thought he saw her shiver.

The soft light was cast by no lamp but a blurred figure standing in front of an iron gate. It wavered, its cloud of light thrumming gently, as if channeling a far-off heartbeat. Dracul knew this creature: a mortal spirit made wraith by a violent death and terrible, human regret. They often dragged their chains through his castle's halls. This one did not; it had no shape, no chains, only mist and light. He did not suffer its presence, but the Librarian wilted in the light—its thrums of energy lifting her hair with otherworldly static.

"Revoke his passage," came a voice from all around as the cloud collapsed and sharpened into the shade of a tall man who burned with the blue light. He might have been handsome once, his bones still were, his hair very white and he himself young, but he had no eyes. One of his sockets was carved clean and the other sealed by scarring, while the face around them had been flenched with knives. His cheeks were split and furrowed, the line of his mouth made unnaturally wide, and his ears notched like a hog's. His neck, in particular, was mutilated worst of all with a torque of twisted, blackened scarring tight against his throat. Wraith light came and went in shivering lines and floating orbs from him. The ghost's lips did not move as he said again:

"Revoke his passage, please, or you will share my fate."

The Librarian released herself, then lifted her hand and pressed through the phantom's chest—his body giving like mist and green lightning lancing through the ectoplasm—

" _I beg you—_ "

—And the phantom dissipated.

With the wraith gone, the Librarian entered three different key codes into an awkwardly modern number pad set in the dark bricks around the gate. When it buzzed happily, she pulled the gating aside—the jumbled shelves of the Dracul Archive beyond. She waited as he passed then stepped in behind him.

"He defied the Mark of Holy Silence," the Librarian said suddenly as she moved about the archive. The few lamps in the room lit amicably at her approach. She touched the tattooed ring at her throat, her mark. "That is why his neck looked like that. He—and I—may only speak freely in this archive. What would you like to see?"

He did not answer, but this did not seem to ruffle her. She waited while Dracul circled the archive: it was small, but not for the collection. Shelves went from floor to ceiling, stuffed with countless books and scrolls while boxes taped shut and covered with writing sat in rows at their feet. Still on the shelves were dusty stacks of DVDs, video games, hard drives, and every type of media for storing music. The bookcases did not go deep into the archive and cluttered close around an oaken table propped up (appropriately) on carved dragon's legs. Further back, a gated office protected the old, very old manuscripts, items too precious and ancient for any research but the most necessary.

"Excuse its state, please. We are still packing for the renovations," said the Librarian, coming to the oaken table. A great, thick book without a title lay there, and she opened it and flipped through the heavy pages. "This is the Dracul Index. I can find anything specific you may want to see here—if you are looking for something in particular."

"The Dracul Index," Dracul echoed as he wandered the crowded shelves. _'And the Dracul Archive._ ' So many things here—with his name on them. Mortals had made movies about him, games, and music, and written many, many books. "What is in here?"

"Your record," his librarian answered promptly, shutting her index. "Everything we know, and have written, of the Prince of Darkness. The texts in the office are from—before. There was a time when we did not know your—prior—identity for certain, so we have also collected artifacts and historical documents from your possible candidates."

Hearing this amused him, and he asked: "Who do you think I was?"

"Historians were not entirely sure, but there were three suspects—Sirs Ignatz and Friedhelm, and Lord Mathias Cronqvist II. Ignatz and Friedhelm were knights of the Brotherhood. Ignatz was discharged in disgrace after having been involved in the rape and murder of a young woman accused of witchcraft. Sir Friedhelm did no wrong that we know of and simply died under mysterious circumstances about the right time in the right place. Lord Cronqvist remains the public favorite. He was heir to a very minor princedom in northern Europa. He never served in the Brotherhood of Light. His blood was too blue, but his dislike for them was storied."

Dracul might have smiled at the names—at the men he wasn't (a Cronqvist! _'That Cronqvist,'_ even. In the eyes of men, how his progenitor had moved up in the old world)—in an archive about him. He asked again, still amused: "And who do _you_ think I was?"

"My mentor, Dr. Jacob Arthuro, wrote a book alleging you were Sir Gabriel Belmont, the hero who thwarted the first coming of the Evil One and vanished long before the Prince of Darkness ever appeared," the Librarian said. "I was his research assistant. I have some attachment to his theories, but his works were unpopular."

"Were they?"

"His research was very sound, but Arthuro was _stubborn_ —"

"And you believe your mentor?"

"No, I believe what is in the archive," she said. "Dr. Arthuro paid very dearly for attempting to publish what he found here."

"So, it is _my_ record?"

"In all parts that were ever recovered, yes," she answered. "I do not think I must tell you that the knowledge here is _explicitly_ forbidden from the public. If it is leaked, the Inhibitors will come. They may not come for you, but they will come for Adrian—and he worked very hard for what he has built."

"Is my son also part of my record?"

"Yes. That is why we are now sure who you were. Over the years, Adrian Wulf has been a very generous donor to the collection."

Knowing this robbed the archival rooms of their mystery—an archive curated by men and donated to by Alucard. It could only be his record—unblemished, uncensored; sloppily, bloodily true—and he had lived a thousand years. What had they recovered? What had they kept?

"Please understand," she said kindly. "We needed to study you—we needed to study Dracul." She left the Index at the table at last but refrained from approaching. "The oldest items, from your first era, are in the office. I can open it—if you wish."

He paused at that and looked aside at the office. His 'first era'—then the documented remains of Gabriel Belmont must lie in that office. Perhaps his life, his mortal record, collected in pieces and scraps. The little room was dimly lit, the bald lamps casting their reflections on the documents protected behind glass there. It contained the only computer in the archival rooms.

The motley collection of pop culture and late Dracul history seemed less unnerving, less stepping into his own tomb.

But Gabriel Belmont was still only a ghost.

"Open it," he said. She nodded and unlocked the office. The glass cases inside were locked too, their dozens of tiny locks winking under the lamps. The Librarian's key seemed to shift subtly for every lock she opened.

"I am sure you can imagine how old these pieces are," She said without any irony. "We do not permit them to be touched." She moved around him and the tiny space deftly, the computer activating at her nearness, and awaiting her login credentials. "But everything has been very meticulously scanned—what may I show you?"

This was the third time she had asked a variant of this question. He assumed an unwillingness to read in a library was more than aggravating for a librarian, but _'I don't wish to see anything,'_ he thought idly, examining the leather books behind the glass, not reading their titles, if they had titles. These items were marked with codes from a decimal system that meant little to him. Magic hummed in the books, hummed in the glass, through whispered spells that warded off dampness, wear, and fire—and, dimly, uncouth readers who dog-eared pages and overstretched bindings.

There was more in here, and clearly more about him, than he had expected, or ever wished to know, and seeing it stacked—bound, counted, and organized—in a physical collection of his life and what the mortal world thought and wrote of that, was—more than he could have anticipated. It was almost appalling that someone somewhere cared this much.

And they, caring so much, had even appointed a series of predecessors leading down to this masked woman to guide him around the ancient and eclectic collection.

"I am not looking for anything," he admitted to her finally. "I only wanted to see this place. I did not think anyone would collect such things."

"But you are very famous," she told him pleasantly, as if 'famous' could ever contain what he had become to the world of men—granted, it had been five hundred years. Perhaps he had been—forgotten in some ways. The Librarian sat at the computer while he browsed, and she clicked through a few screens. Digital renderings of ancient manuscript flying by as she worked. A printer embedded the desk chuckled and produced a print-out of verse. "May I ask you something instead then?" He said nothing and came to the desk where the print-out cooled. "I have always wondered how you became connected to this item. I think I could die happy if I knew."

He smiled barely at her comment and took the print-out from the desk. It was a paltry printed copy of a piece of parchment he had not seen in years and years—remembering the loved color and feel of the original parchment, its hand-written lyrics, pinched his heart. Marie had adored this; there was little paper in their house that she loved better than the one that bore this song. The page gave a ballad, to be played by fiddle with harp and flute, along two lengths of verse to be sung in duet—with a part for a gentleman and a part for a lady. It had been written by and addressed from a "Sir Thomas the Fiddler" to his "dear friends" on their wedding day—"Marie and Gabriel".

"I have always wanted to know," the Librarian said when Dracul returned the printout to her.

"It was a wedding present," he told her simply.

"It is a terrible wedding present," she replied. The shock of personality jarred the stillness of the black mask. She recited the lady's first verse of the duet aloud to him:

"Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

Remember me to one who lives there,

For he once was a true love of mine."

The fiddler's music seemed to spike in the air and haunt the verses—an eerie fiddle, that warbled and sung like a high, living voice as it called ghosts to dance and listen and sing at a wedding in springtime, under a sky wheeling with stars and foggy with bonfire smoke—in spite of the Librarian's unmusical reading. The phantom music seemed to flit about the archive still as she continued: "An—pardon— _inappropriate_ song for newlyweds. Why did Sir Thomas give it to you?"

Or perhaps, it was only his memory—abandoning his body and his mind in this moment and coming alive among the ancient books—of that night, in another life, a thousand years ago.

"Because," Dracul said finally, "it was about us." He turned as he looked into another cabinet. The Librarian rose from the computer.

"That, _that_ is what I would like to know—"

"—and then you will die happy." He felt her smile behind him, in spite of the mask.

"Yes, I think I will."

So, in spite of himself, and almost not knowing why, he chose to tell her. After all, this was his archive, the Dracul Archive, and all within it, was forbidden— _explicitly_. What was said within this office would never leave.

"It was very long ago," he began.

— — —

 _Thank you for reading!_

 _There are notes available on 'Scarborough Fair' at the end of chapter 4. - SM_


	5. The Vows

_Disclaimer: I do not own CV: LoS. I receive no profit from this publication. This fic contains images from folklore and folk songs available in the public domain._

 _This is the first of the two nested stories. I am still figuring out the best way to show where these stories end and begin so it will be easiest to read. For now, I'm trying out giving Plot B its own title and a prefix, 'Tale I' for now. I don't know if I'm happy with this system yet. (If you have any ideas, do tell, please! :3) There are other cues too. The writing style is a little different. Plot B is very action-oriented, and the narrator is more distant from the characters. The events operate on fairy tale-like logic too._

 _The reason I have this plot structure is because a.) I wanted to write Plots B and C, and b.) the main plot A spends most of its time telling stories or reading stories, because it's meant to support Plots B and C until it starts to unfold on its own. So, the nested stories bring action and intrigue when it's still too early in the frame story. As the endgame gets closer, the three stories will twist together._

 _This fic is still not historically accurate: Gabriel and Marie could probably be younger than 20, but I didn't want to write teenagers in this situation._

 **Chapter 4—The Vows**

 **Tale I—Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme**

It was very long ago when a ragged woman came to a village in the skirts of the White Mountains. She came on the winds of an autumn squall as ragged as she, twigs and red leaves twined in her hair. Her eyes and skin the cold gray of the storm that flew ahead of her as she traveled. She seemed to drive the thunderheads themselves until they shattered on the mountainsides. Her passage stripped the trees bare and the frost fell early as she left the pastures for the highlands, and the village.

Once there, once in the village square, she went to the all houses around the well and told them fortunes no one wanted. When the people would not hear her freely, she shouted her prophecies through windows and doors whose cracks and gaps were stuffed against her and her spells. She hawked even at the uncaring gates of Prince Cronqvist.

After days of the Rag Woman's crying, her weird storms broke for softer weather, and on the first clear morning, sunlight fell on the house of Voclain, a prosperous merchant clan with generations laid into the town. Theirs was a fine, old, three-story house, loved by its family, and it watched like a guardian over the village's well and its smaller houses. The Patriarch of this household was a good man, and in his golden years, he was wise, kind, and dearly loved by his family. He had many children and many grandchildren: the youngest was Marie. Marie was bright-eyed with raven hair tangled as a fairy thicket. She was twenty and full of summer, but her heart knew no swaying from dashing smiles or brave gazes because she already belonged to another, for many years.

Or at least, she had.

Her betrothal was broken.

She chose the man who would be her husband long ago, but now, they would not marry. It was not her father's wish to break the engagement. The man she had chosen for her own, Gabriel Belmont, was a good man, a worthy man, but to break the engagement was the binding and absolute wish of her grandfather, the Patriarch of their family. He would not have him for son-in-law—not any longer.

Her grandfather gave no reason for this decision to his family, least of all to the youngest of his granddaughters. He spoke of the manner quietly with her father in the den of the Voclain house. Marie lay against the wall in the corridor outside, listening to their voices through the walls.

"Marie is _coddled_ , Bram," the Patriarch told his son, her father, while attempting at a cold gentility. "It has made her—willful. I permit it no more, and I forbid this union. Tell the Belmont boy, at once—" His son made some argument, and the Patriarch's voice grew hard, urgent: " _At once_ —"

Marie allowed this talk of her no more and charged her elders through the door. Her father stepping back as the Patriarch stood firm to greet her.

"I am not willful," Marie told him, making no secret of her eavesdropping. "I love Gabriel—I will only have him!" She cracked from the fierceness of her admission, tears tracing her cheeks as her voice hitched and fell. "Grandfather—why? Why—do this? Why now? You gave us your blessing—Why do you—" The Patriarch's eyes softened; she was his youngest granddaughter after all. For her, in all matters before this, his touch was softest.

"My girl—" He stroked her hair.

"Tell me—please?"

"I will not burden you with the reasons for why I must do what I must—"

"Will you burden me then?" said the man of much discussion in their house, the 'Belmont boy'. He had been let in by the Patriarch's front door and led to this very den by another of the granddaughters, Katriona, who kept in the Belmont's shadow. "I would hear your reasons."

He wore the wet autumn day on him in the thick and dripping cloak draped over his armor. The red armor flickered with the light of the Patriarch's hearth—the reflection of fire catching in the skull over his breastplate and its golden trimmings. He was a Knight of the Brotherhood newly made, and a young captain, by their measures, of just twenty and some years old. He entered the den unarmed, except for the battle cross that never left the sides of brothers of his rank, and carried a leather tube. This he left on a nearby table as he pulled back his hood, droplets of the rain misting his neck, darkening his hair.

Marie moved to go to him, but the Patriarch held her with a hand.

"I will speak to him, Marie," he said. "Very soon, this will be your concern no more. Step aside."

"Grandfather—"

He silenced her with a sharper look, and she retreated, never feeling so weak and young in her life as she did under that glare.

"Sir Belmont," the Patriarch said. "I mean you no great disrespect in annulling this arrangement. Your rank is most esteemed, but you must understand that for my youngest grandchild, I desire— _better_ than what you bargain for her."

This pronouncement struck all in the room, even the Brotherhood Knight, as Marie blanched, and her father asked:

"What do you mean by that?"

The Patriarch did not answer his son and looked into the face of the young man once to be his son-in-law, his old eyes still steel and brightness even as the red knight towered over him.

"Understand me," the Patriarch began, "the rank of a Captain of the Brotherhood of Light is no small deed. Your standing is hard fought for and well deserved for one such as you—and you are a rich man for it, richer than God would have you in another trade." He approached the knight as he went on and his family hung in meek stasis around them. Rain clattered on windows overhead. "But I know you; I know your kind. You pillage—you and your rabble of murderers. You recruit men from gallows—killers, thieves, rapists, disgraces all— _animals_ in bright armor. Even you, _sir_ —even your name, Belmont, is not your own—you too disgraced to carry your father's."

The Patriarch shook from the tirade, his each breath shallow and tremulous, a saw on the silence as still, the room did not move. Slowly, Marie's cousin crept to her from the doorway. They barely breathed as the girls held each other, the cousin guiding Marie's head to her shoulder. Gabriel said nothing, and the Patriarch continued:

"Undoubtedly, you've the troves of demons to offer me for my granddaughter's hand—treasures I cannot dream of—and nor do I wish to, since they are earned in slaughter. But I'll not sell her to you for such bloody gold, sir," the Patriarch spat. "Mine—hers—is a fortune earned in honor, earned in _service_. So, I do not want you for my grandchild, for my Marie. I revoke my blessing, and I forbid this union."

Gabriel came before the Patriarch, who held his gaze—proud and sharp as an old falcon, unshaken by the clinking armor, the brown bear's height of the man in front of him.

"Your grandchild is worth far more than demon's gold," Gabriel told him. "I would never offer that for her. What service must I do to prove myself worthy of her? Command me, and it will be done."

"There is nothing you may do," the Patriarch repeated. "I refuse."

A log over the fire cracked and split, sparks and smoke dancing up into the chimney as a thick and mysterious silence fell over the room. Even the rain softened, a distant patter as the knight came down on one knee, then knelt low, head bowed—imploring.

"I beg you," Gabriel said, his voice unshaken, even as he pleaded with the old man. "I will not live without her. I will do anything— _anything_ —you ask. Name it, and it will be done."

The Patriarch regarded the giant man beseeching him from his floor. His lip twisted, as if the sight bored him.

"Then die," the Patriarch said. "It will not be long for you—the hordes of darkness consume your kind soon enough—"

The others could contain themselves no more after this exchange, and Marie left her cousin, her father coming beside her.

"Grandfather— _no!_ What's come over you?"

"You—you _cannot_ mean this—Gabriel has always—"

"I mean, _children_ ," the Patriarch reminded his family harshly, "that he may _do nothing._ I _forbid_ it—"

"Father, please—you're—"

" _Obey me, Bram!_ Control your daughter, and send this unworthy creature from my house. I will not speak on this matter again—"

"I will match him," Marie said suddenly. All eyes met her—the air in the room so heavy, the rain falling in sheets against the house. All its walls groaned and murmured in the wind, the torrent pouring down even the chimney, hissing as rain met the fires. Marie held Gabriel's gaze longest before she turned and faced her grandfather again. "Give him a task, grandfather—any task—and I will match him. I will see him worthy, I swear it—"

"You will match him? _You_ will match _him_? Your _impudence!_ " the Patriarch barked. Marie's cousin watched with her hand over her mouth as her grandfather's face darkened, his eyes black with rage, as if something inhuman glared hatefully at them from behind the mask of the face she had known all her life. His eye seemed to go glassy and twitch unnaturally, a threading of veins bulging at his temple, before he came calm again, the terrible anger contained.

"Then do this for me!" the old man said, breathing heavily, before he called an oath down on them: an oath to be immortalized in Sir Thomas' songs, an oath of impossible tasks, as the old man's eyes flickered darkly, demonic outrage flashing there. "If you will only have this man, make him a cambric shirt—without seams nor needlework. Do this, and you may have him." Then, he turned on Gabriel, his face a maw, really, the mouthpiece of some wicked spirit. "And you, sir—if you would have her, find her an acre of land, between the salt water and the sea sand, and reap it with a sickle of leather. I give you one year. If in one year, you both do these tasks, then once they are done, and only then, will I permit this affront to my person! This I swear—to God and to you impudent fools—on my honor and my life."

Gabriel had risen to stand beside Marie, who felt even her chest shaking, her heart overfull and her ribs its trembling cage. She clasped her hands to break her shivering, as—surprising even herself—her voice didn't shake as she said:

"Thank you, grandfather, I will do this— _we_ will do this—I swear it— _thank you_ —"

As quickly as the dark anger fled, it rushed back, animating the Patriarch's body. That rage forced him blindly before his youngest granddaughter and drew his hand back in a move so unlike their patriarch that Katriona screamed out when she realized what her grandfather intended to do with that arm—

Even Bram could not move, shocked into silence at this _display_ that had become his father, his family. His own father raising a hand against his child, _any_ child, in their household—

But the blow did not fall. Gabriel came between them and caught the old man's arm, his gauntlets savage and silver in the embroidery of the Patriarch's coat.

"Don't dare it—" Gabriel began, his warning barely words, as Bram rushed between them. He put hands on both his father and Gabriel and split them forcibly.

"Enough— _Enough_!" Bram said to the entire room. "Go, Gabriel—this is—this is my business! _Go now!_ "

Gabriel slipped from Bram's grip and went without a word.

"Daughter, niece— _Out_!" Bram ordered again over his shoulder and Katriona hustled out with Marie at once. They only made it as far as the corridor, Marie pulling the door shut behind them as Katriona stopped to stare blankly before she covered her face and burst into tears.

"Marie—Grandpa—Grandpa was _going to hit you_ —" Katriona's voice broke with a sob. "What in—what is happening? I don't understand—he's never—never—" Marie took her cousin in her arms, and they leaned against the wall together, Katriona still weeping and Marie petting her hair.

"I don't know—I don't know."

— — —

Just before nightfall, the rain cleared—the sky turning blue and starry in a strange burst of summer evening, the last of the year, as the moon strolled full and white over the highlands and up into the mountains. Marie wore a blue cloak out into the pleasant night as she made quickly on her butter-colored mare for an apple orchard at the southernmost corner of her family's holdings. The trees there were picked of their fruit now, the paths between the rows scattered with fallen leaves.

She was going there at this hour because she knew he would be waiting.

 _'_ _Because we always meet there,'_ she thought—wanting to smile, even as she could not—not today. As much as she wanted to think of him, to feel the comfort of him in her thoughts, her heart still twinged with the trauma of the afternoon past—her grandfather's rage, Katriona's crying—and their promise.

 _'_ _An acre of land, between the salt water and the sea sand. Does such a thing even exist—anywhere?'_

Let alone a cambric shirt—without seams or needlework.

 _'_ _If I can make it, is it even a cambric shirt anymore?'_ she wondered wryly, burying her hands in her horse's mane, the sweet warmth of the animal soothing her as the darkness of the orchard arrived over a hill. She pressed her mount on, the last of the pasture flying by with the horse's cry.

They broke through the trees, moonlight flashing through the streaking branches, and Marie spotted ahead a black thunderhead of a destrier—if the great horse were mounted, his rider would be sitting among apples here. The horse stood with his rider against a tree at the edge of the orchard, and Marie pulled back on the reins, her mare slowing to canter up to this tree. The windows in the compound of the Brotherhood of Light glowed like many candles over the Brotherhood's Wood a mile or so off.

Long ago, in summer, they had met and played here as children.

"Sir?" she greeted him, and he offered her his smile and his arm to help her down from the saddle in return.

"You've ridden her hard today," he said of the horse once she was safe on earth. The neck and chest of the mare gleamed with sweat. Marie still half-leaned against the horse and frowned at her heedlessness.

"She knew we were in a hurry," she said, wanting and not wanting to look at him. Marie had been so full of _something_ —something mad, and _willful_ , this afternoon, and even this evening as she rode like a wind over the pasture, and whatever it was, it was gone now. It almost left her without legs—her face fell; her eyes watered. "Gabriel—I—I don't know why this is happening—he—he's never been like that— _ever_ —he—he wouldn't, really—"

"It doesn't matter—you're not coming to harm from anyone if I am there."

"Thank you for doing it," she said earnestly, "and thank you for doing no more—he, he wasn't himself."

She felt odd and unlike herself, defending her grandfather doing the—unthinkable. He had never in his life been a man to strike his children or his children's children. He looked down on it fiercely—it wasn't what family did.

"I know," he said. "Something—is amiss. Even the land is strange since the storm. There are cave trolls in the lowlands—"

"In the lowlands? But won't they starve down there—"

"We had thought them smarter than that too—but they're moving, dozens and dozens. The rain must have flushed them out," and scattered them and their brood—half-drowned, starving, and all the more violent for it—on the unsuspecting farms under the White Mountains. Marie still leaned against her horse, her hands wringing the saddle belts idly.

"Are you going then? To the lowlands?" she asked.

"No. I've asked for leave from duty," Gabriel said and untangled her worrying hand from the saddle belt. He held her tenderly with both hands, one of his thumbs stroking over the curl of hers, the claws of his gauntlets creeping about his gloves. "I'm going to find it, Marie. I don't know how, but I'm going to find it." He released her.

The acre of land—between the salt water and the sea sand—

"You are such a quick worker," she told him gently. "When do you leave?"

"I go in the morning—at first light."

"Where?"

"The coast."

"That's so far," Marie told him. She had never been to the ocean; she had elders who lived and died never seeing the sea.

"It is. I think—I think I will be gone long, longer than ever before." He was speaking strangely, with more words and the hints of a stammer than he would use in higher spirits—and immediately, she realized his nervousness as he said: "Will you wait for me—"

"Why would you ask that?" she said, coming to him and taking his face in both hands. "Of course I will! With any luck, my love, you will come riding over that hill, with my acre found and reaped, and I will only have a sleeve done of your shirt." He smiled at her, the warmest sight she'd seen all day. Then, he embraced her suddenly, tightly, leaving a kiss in her hair, and then another on the edge of her brow, and holding her still, he said:

"And by then, I'll have traveled the world looking for your acre, and I'll bring you something back from every land I see—"

"I won't need for any of that," Marie said as she rocked with him, "especially if such luggage slows you down." A cold wind came, like autumn sighing with winter breathing down its neck, and they held each other tighter. "Though you mustn't go marrying a princess while you are across the world. I suspect you'll make a very dashing world traveler. Princesses will certainly tell each other about you."

"Why would I marry a princess?"

This went on like this a while; the silly sweetness, the back and forth of young people in love. The moon rolled on as they talked low and soft, a pearled wheel turning through curls of cloud as the night passed. There was desperation in the lightness of their mood, with both trying not to think of the long separation to come. He had always journeyed, and they always knew he would, but the long journeys, the year or longer away from each other, had always seemed so far away, long ahead, and Marie supposed as she closed her eyes and rested her cheek on his shoulder that she thought such times just wouldn't come, not really.

And that he would leave her like this for the first time as her husband, not a suitor still without her.

He smelled so richly of leather and metal, oil and woods. She opened her eyes, smiling drowsily, and asked again:

"Not even if three princesses begged you?"

"Not even if one!" he promised.

— — —

He left her after midnight, maybe; Marie could not be too sure, but the church bells were still. She, so completely warm, as if he hadn't left her, wandered back on her horse to the dark house. There was no stable hand to greet her at this hour, and Marie was not entirely sure her father didn't know she had gone and stayed away so late. He was perhaps too lenient—

—or she was perhaps too willful.

Either way, when lantern light spilled into the stables from the house, Marie had been expecting her father, not Katriona.

"You're home," Katriona said, lowering her light. "I—I waited."

Marie pushed back the hood of her cloak and swept out her hair, combing it with her fingers as she met her cousin at the backdoor into the house.

"It's so late, Katriona! Did you come to scold me?"

Katriona shook her head: her dark hair looped in swinging braids at either side of her face. It was a sweet, sisterly image, particularly to one who only ever had brothers—Marie smiled. Her heart was fluttery with the warmth from the orchard, its flush still on her lips and her cheeks, but the night began to leech it: she had nearly forgotten how murky the house could become once evening fell.

"I wanted to talk to you, cousin," Katriona said, stepping aside for Marie's passage. The back hall of the house was warm and dark, full of the family sleeping. Normally, this darkness was a wrap of peace, to feel and hear them all resting well, serenely—but tonight, tonight the familiar dark was restless, watching. Even inside, with cloak put away, Marie was still cold, the walls of her house like ice.

"What about?" Marie asked, giving into an unusual compulsion to whisper, as if something might hear them. Katriona nearly put out the lamp and whispered too: they walked close together up the stairs and toward the little corridor they shared—the doors to their rooms across the way from each other. The darkness clawed around them, moving like a cloud, languid and oily, from the pale lamplight.

"Erik—"—one of the house boys—"—told me Grandfather hasn't been _right_ since—"

"Since?"

"Since he spoke to the—the Rag Woman," Katriona said this especially quietly, like she were speaking the name of a childhood spook.

"The 'Rag Woman'?"

Katriona nodded. "That—that dirty lady, who came into town yesterday, and started shouting. Erik said his brother saw her talk to Grandpa—and—and Grandpa caught him watching—"

Marie's heart froze to hear this. "Then what happened?"

Katriona whimpered. "Oh, Marie, he—he _beat_ him for seeing— _badly_ —Peder's not been up since it happened—his—his mother didn't tell Uncle Bram until after you left tonight. Nobody's—Nobody knows what to do—he's—he's _never_ done anything like this— _never_ —"

Marie nodded silently. After all, she had said the same thing herself only hours ago.

"Why would he—that poor boy—will he be all right?"

Katriona nodded again. "I think—"

Something creaked in the darkness, and Marie's eyes flew to the stairway—empty, but her heart told her otherwise. That empty dark seemed too— _thick_. They had paused before the door to Marie's bedchamber, Katriona's lay further down the hallway—in the darkness.

"Come in with me," Marie told her cousin, opening the door and shooing them both inside. The creaking seemed to follow them, fast, the rafters and the floors full of clucks and squeaks, rasps and a dragging—as if many things in the 'empty' darkness were piling on the room, rustling up to the shut door, with more yet creeping up the stairs from below and down from the floors overhead. Marie shut the door firmly and locked it before she went to a box of trinkets and jewelry she kept on a small table with the only mirror she owned. She plucked out a pure silver crucifix that had belonged to her mother and hung it on the door knob.

Immediately, the heavy settling of the house stopped.

Katriona had climbed on the bed, holding her legs to her chin.

"Why—why did you do that, Marie?"

And when she asked, Marie found immediately that she didn't know why she'd done it. She went to her windows and locked them, as if she had intended to do that too, as if the threat waited outside, in the trees, and not looming at the door.

"It needed to be done," was all she said.

"I'm sleeping with you tonight," Katriona said quickly. "I—I don't want to walk to my room."

"I'm glad for that—I don't want you to."

Katriona, in her good sense, had dressed for bed already, so Marie readied quietly and then let her cousin braid her hair after she stoked up the little hearth in the corner of the room. The chamber warmed, the firelight good and golden. They sat on her bed together, finally—safe again.

"Katriona," Marie said at last as Katriona braided. "What happened to the Rag Woman? Did—did Erik know?"

"She's been arrested," Katriona said, finishing the braid and smoothing it down her cousin's back. The girls rose together and turned back the covers. "After shouting at the Prince's house. I—I wonder—what did she say to Grandpa?"

"I wonder too," Marie said, and _'Perhaps,_ ' she thought as she lay down, Katriona pressing close in an eerie cold that crept in as the fire banked low, _'I will find out.'_

The night became soft and quiet, and as Katriona slept, Marie could not. This night chilled her, the warmth from earlier seeped too quickly, no more than a memory now. She tucked it away safely, in her mind, her heart, before this night smothered it completely. Wind worried the window sash, and Marie laid back in her pillow and listened to her cousin stir in a dream, an anxious dream. An anxious dream that she knew waited for her, once she slept, and she looked into the rafters for the sky above the house. She closed her eyes, seeing the stars as they lay, looking down on her, and then the faces of her family—Katriona, her father and grandfather—and Gabriel. By morning, Gabriel would be gone, traveling, chasing the acre, but she, and her family, would still be here, with this darkness in their house.

 _'_ _Quiet Friend,'_ she prayed in the stillness between worries, _'please look after them.'_

— — —

 _I'm sorry—I'm the kind of mean writer who goes, "So, Gabriel and Marie married happily in spring? With the blessings of her family and the Brotherhood? Nothing went wrong? Even a little? That's no fun at all!" I don't write a lot of romance, so that sweet Gabriel/Marie scene in the middle did almost hospitalize me. If it had gone on any longer, I might have died. I immediately wrote a creepy scene to recover._

 _The tasks posed to Marie and Gabriel are taken from 'Scarborough Fair (The original lyrics are posted on Wikipedia.) I let the Patriarch ask Gabriel for an extra step, to reap the acre with a 'sickle of leather,' because it's very fitting for a Belmont. It's a whip, get it? =)_

 _If you want to hear this song, Celtic Woman does a nice, classic version. Leaves' Eyes has a metal and an acoustic version (I like the acoustic version better, personally). Mediaeval Baebes does a very pretty version with the extra lyrics: "Love imposes impossible tasks/Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme/Although not more than any heart asks/And I must know he's a true love of mine". Depending on how who is performing, it's either about true love won through impossible tasks, or it's the medieval version of "We are never, ever getting back together". I like the images in the ballad a lot, so I decided to use it._ _I'm also leaning on the first interpretation._

 _Thank you for reading! There will be two chapters next week, but after that, the chapters get too long. They are typically 6k to 8k, so single chapters will go up as opposed to two 4-5k chapters. See you next week! - SM_


	6. The Fairy Errand

_Disclaimer: I still don't know CV: LoS. This fic references folklore and fairy tales. Generally, if you don't recognize it, it's mine._

 _Dear readers, I have given up on this Saturday posting thing and decided to post on Sundays. It's just so much less of a rush, and I am posting at ten minutes after midnight on Sunday morning anyway. It lets me spread the workload of editing over the weekend instead of rushing it around other adult stuff I have to get done on weekends._

 _Anyway! I hope y'all like Gabriel and children because there is a lot of Gabriel and children in these two chapters. If you don't like Gabriel and children, worry not, there won't be as many children after ch. 6, but if you don't like Gabriel, then I can't help you._

 **Chapter 5—The Fairy Errand**

 ** _Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme_**

Gabriel waited for morning alone in the Brotherhood's Wood but for his horse. He prayed in this solitude, the familiar and silent wood path his church and the solemn trees his pews.

 _'_ _Heavenly Father, watch over us.'_

When sun came slowly along the ground, through the trees and mist, he swung up into his saddle and began riding, west and west, to the edge of the land. He rode in rain, in sleet, the roads left torn and barren by the storms. The sky still cracked with their thunder as his cloak lay pasted to his skin, his horse dripping.

Gabriel headed seaward because an acre of land between the salt water and the sea sand could only lie seaward. If it truly existed, it hid somewhere along the miles of white shore lain there like a necklace along the ocean, strung with driftwood, shells, and weathered bones.

He gripped his reins—he would search all his life if he had to. As long as she waited, he would never stop.

 _'_ _Marie, I will find it.'_

He pressed onward, the coast nearing. The air wet and briny smelling, with the far hiss of waves, as a thin line of dark and iron-colored water wavered on the horizon—

 _'_ _The sea.'_

Gabriel stopped his horse to watch and listen to it toss so distantly. He had never seen the sea before, and it faded as the sun slipped low behind the storm. The coastland too swam before the ocean, a last, little harbor town bobbing in swells of hills. On the outskirts of town, at the foot of the highest hill, Gabriel found the west-most station of the Brotherhood of Light, the last knights before the battering sea. They were meager: half-a-dozen old men, half-a-dozen young boys. No one in between the beginning and the end of his career, but they knew him by his armor, welcomed him, and housed his horse. It was heavily evening, half of the posting was already asleep, and Gabriel left for town to find supper on foot.

Knights from his compound came this far west only rarely, and for Gabriel, the roaring and smell of the sea mingled with the rumbling storm, its scent of lightning. Though alien, far from home, the storm was familiar—in a world of many mountains, many seas, but only one sky. He looked down from this dark sky now as the lamps of an inn came through the curtains of rain.

Gabriel pushed the inn's doors aside, the tavern fire meeting him kindly, even as he felt wetter than wet, barely human before he trudged into this inn. It was crowded with the usual kind—sailors and locals meeting to smoke, drink, and play dice. Their pipe smoke stunk terribly, but word said smoking leaves made a sad man happy and a happy man sad. Gabriel himself smoked only seldom, at holidays. An old friend of his had a daily habit of it, and the coughs that followed made it—unappealing.

The innkeeper met him at his counter and knew his armor under his sodden cloak.

"Welcome, brother! Sit, sit," the innkeeper said, and Gabriel sat wearily. "Where have you come from and where are you going?"

"I came from the east compound, at Belvoir," Gabriel told him, putting back his hood. It had done him no help; the rain plastered his hair to his skull. "And I'm seeking passage by the coast. South."

"What sends you south?" The innkeeper topped off a mug of hot, mulled wine for him, its roasted smell of spices welcome indeed. Gabriel smiled to himself; a harbor's innkeeper might chuckle to hear his errand. He drank, and when the mug was back on the counter, he said:

"I'm seeking an acre of land between the salt water and the sea sand."

The tavern answered him with deader-than-dead silence. The gregarious ruckus of the room gone: the chatter stifled, the dice still, even the hearth didn't crackle. Gabriel realized there had been a harp and fiddle, playing low and cheerily together, among the rabble when they stopped. The innkeeper stared at him—very hard, very grim.

"Fairy errands end in the grave. Get your horse and go home."

"I will not," Gabriel said. "I've sworn."

"Find a new woman," the innkeeper told him. "You're not the first to come this way seekin' the acre. I pray you're not swearin' your oaths to the same bride—the hidden folk _seduce_ —"

Gabriel stood, silent and with hands braced on the counter. The rain still coursed feeble rivulets down his gauntlets.

"I will not. I've sworn," he said again and steadily. "If you know where the acre is, you should tell me."

"I'll not tell a word! You'll thank me for it," the old innkeeper said. Time had made him soft and graying but not afraid of young knights on quests for death. "Out of my inn. Fools don't stay. Get your horse, and _go home._ "

And Gabriel went, without argument and in search of other merchants to take his money and feed him for the night, but by the next day, his errand had flown fast on wings of gossip. The sailors and harbor men all knew him and his task, without saying, and he knew it by their sidelong stares as he walked the piers in the morning. They dodged him as he came, playing at absorbed in the work of loading cargo below holds, drawing up sails, and picking barnacles from worn hulls. Any drudgery more interesting than a knight seeking the "sea hag's acre," as some ship boy whispered.

They were not all cold: an old fisherman, sea-weathered and happy, told Gabriel that he seemed a very good lad. He'd fish his body from the surf when this was done and send word of his passing to his lady and his compound. The seawater was fiercely cold this time of year. He'd keep a few days until the fisherman and his grandsons found him—if nothing made his corpse its meal.

Gabriel walked on into the harbor smog. Rain menaced again, threatening another storm to put out Hell as the sky thickened—

—and a boy tugged on his cloak, a boy unlike any in the harbor. He was a very small, brown child with a thicket of black hair, black eyes, and a bright smile.

" _Em-mee_ ," the boy called up to him. "My sister has a boat, _em-mee_ , come and see my sister."

No one looked after the boy as Gabriel followed him through the passages of bows where figureheads hung over them, carved with maidens both smiling and painted, splintering and green from the sea. Clouds of sails overhead breathed the sea wind in and out as their riggings creaked. All the while, the boy ran, as if this were great fun. The little one went on his way invisibly, passing sailors without so much as a look. No one paid him mind or even seemed to see him as he brushed them by and led Gabriel toward the far-most mooring.

"We're almost there, _em-mee_ ," the little one told him excitedly. "We're almost to my sister's ship!"

"Who is your sister?"

"Faiza."

"And what is your name?"

"Jabir."

Their names were foreign, from the far golden crescent across the sea where the people spoke in music and poetry. How had they come so far to this harbor? Their foreignness alone might have explained how the harbor men ignored them—but—

"Who are you, _em-mee_?" Jabir asked. The boy walked backward over the planks, his arms folded behind his head. No one stopped him, even as he stepped precariously over rolls of rope, dancing around cargo crates.

"Gabriel," he said, watching the boy. The child stumbled—inevitably—and Gabriel caught him, pulled him upright, and away from the water. "Is your sister looking for passengers on her ship?"

"No," Jabir said, frank. "Just you. _Khle_ told us to wait for you."

"'Khle'?"

"It means—like—'aunt,'" said a girl's voice over them. Jabir had brought him to the side of a red dhow moored alone on the wave-beaten pier. Its bright hull burned against the grayness of sea and sky; bronze eyes painted on its bow. A girl stood up on its deck, teenaged and as brown as Jabir with eyes as black. She wrapped her hair with an amber scarf, and she wore no shoes, only a jade anklet, as her orange skirts swirled under a belt of coins at her hips. A dark whip hung wound at her side. In one of her nostrils were two gold rings, one with a sapphire, and in the other hung a silver hook with a pearl carved in the shape of a rose. The lines of her eyes were dark and hooked with kohl.

"Welcome back!" she said gladly to the boy, and then to Gabriel: "And all health and peace to you, mister! Seek you passage? Along the coast?"

"I do," Gabriel said. "You are Faiza?"

"I _am_ Faiza," she said, bold as brass, the captain of her dhow. "Jabir introduced himself?" Jabir nodded a lot. "Good boy!" He giggled, tiny laughs and tiny smiles, and Faiza looked down at Gabriel from her perch. "We will take you by all the secret, safe routes, if you passage with us!"

"What do I pay you?"

"With your back," Faiza said plainly. "We don't want money."

" _Khle_ told us to wait for you," Jabir said again before he headed up the ramp into the dhow. "Come on, come on!"

But when Gabriel followed the boy, Faiza came briskly to the ramp, her hand out.

"Leave the weapon. That iron is too heavy," she said, her eyes on the battle cross at his belt. "The dhow will sink."

"This weapon is important to me—" Gabriel began, and Faiza thrust her hand out further.

"If you sail with us, you leave it," she commanded. Gabriel relented, unhooking the cross and laying it on the weathered pier, as Faiza retreated back on deck.

Her dhow was a boat of a different kind. It sat low in the water, its boards stitched together and its hull tapered to points at stern and bow. It flew a golden, lateen sail from a tall mast, which sighed happily, even in unkind winds. While smaller than other ships moored in the harbor, the dhow still looked large enough to crew with a dozen or so men, but Gabriel saw no one but the children.

While his battle cross lay out on the dock, the sea rocking beneath it on little waves lined with brightness from the sunset.

Once below deck, where it was restfully dim and warm, Gabriel stroked the beams of the hull carefully, listening with his hands for any sound, any whisper—of something _untoward_ haunting within the boat—but there was no answering growl or tortured mutter. The ship even appeared _kind_ , full of memories for the warm waters it flew on to reach this harbor, the hills of golden sand it left behind and longed with love for still.

It felt odd to be so cautious, cautious in the face of his mission. He had been found by two children offering to take him where he needed to go, for nothing but his labor, and an 'aunt' who told them to wait for him. He was expected—favorably—for the first time since he arrived on the coast.

But still, he listened to the ship as he ran his fingers along the curve of the galley wall. He searched the pitched walls for a spirit in the dhow, a spirit that would not abide iron on its boat—

—and a voice _did_ speak, a child's voice. Gabriel pulled back from the hull, the little voice jolting up into his mind from his fingertips.

 _Em-mee,_ it said before it giggled. _What are you lookin' for?_

Gabriel opened and closed his hand as the little voice giggled again from a dark corner of the galley, out of reach of the sunlight streaming down from the deck. It giggled even as Gabriel took a bright plate from its place among the kitchen trappings and bounced sunlight into its corner. Nothing hid there, but the giggling _moved_.

It flew along the wall of the galley, nearly touching him—a child, invisible and fast—before it hid in the other far corner, low to the floor, and still giggled. Gabriel set the plate back and returned to the ladder. The sea water lapped softly at the sides of the ship, cradling its hollowness, as he made his way up from the belly of the dhow.

Jabir waited for him at the top of the ladder.

"Did you see my place?" he asked. "Down there is my place!"

Gabriel smiled and stepped up on deck as Jabir scampered from the ladder to the bow where he leaned on the rail to watch the water, dapples of reflected light playing on his little face.

"It is a good ship." Faiza came beside Gabriel to watch her brother. "It is small; it is fast; it is playful."

"It seems so," Gabriel said—for all he knew of ships, for all he knew of these children. "Faiza, where is your crew?"

"No crew," Faiza told him. "Just us—and you." She grinned. "That's why we need your back! You are as strong as ten men! Right?"

"Is Jabir much help?"

Faiza was quiet as she started the task of bringing down the sail for the night. They would not depart until morning, after he'd made arrangements for his horse, his cross, and whatever else he could not carry with the Brotherhood of Light's little station.

"You better be as strong as eleven men then," she said, straining with the rigging before Gabriel came to her aid, and together, they dropped the sail slowly. Meanwhile, Jabir wandered the deck, watching and not working—really too young to dally in such grown-up things. Faiza didn't watch him much as she worked, and Gabriel kept one eye on the boy.

"Where do you come from?" he asked, tying off his side of the sail.

"Far," Faiza said, the sail at last secured. Her eyes were suddenly old, and distant, black as midnight. "Go take care of your horse, your weapon, Gabriel. We sail on the dawn."

He disembarked then without another question and took his cross from the pier.

Before the next sunrise, Gabriel left his cross in the captain's office and his horse in the stable after saying good-bye to his old friend. The stable boy promised that the horse would not go bored. They hadn't any animals so huge as him; he'd find "tree stumps and stuff to pull up, and knock over the whole countryside," the boy said. A horse of the Brotherhood was worth almost as much as his knight—"He'll be looked after, sir."

Gabriel thanked him with nothing more than a hand on the boy's shoulder and took his leave, his pack over his shoulder. In the yellow morning, the harbor crawled with crews on ships making ready for the ocean—shouts and cries, whorls of sails unfurling and swelling with sea winds.

Again, Jabir met him and led him to Faiza's dhow, the panels of its golden sail spotted by red-rimmed clouds and new sun. The children talked less this morning. Jabir had led him quietly and yawning until he toddled up the ramp into the dhow and below deck again.

"Sleepyhead," Faiza remarked, watching her little brother go. "Ready, mister?"

Gabriel nodded and pulled the ramp up from the dock without her asking. Faiza grinned and clapped his shoulder.

"You are a good crew—all eleven of you!"

She looked up at the mast rising over them. A round copper mask with three eyes and a grinning mouth with tusks hung from the post.

"We go!" she shouted as the mask brightened with morning, the dark glass set in its eyes flashing green, red, and purple. The dhow needed no servants, no guiding, and took to the water as if pulled by hands beneath the waves. Foam cut from the bow, trailing in the water. It flew fast over the ocean, leaving the harbor's own ships in its spray, their captains trying in vain to catch the same wind.

The sun rose higher, the sail rippling as Faiza guided the ship—in most unusual fashion. When she wanted to press starboard, she walked to the bow, put her hands on the starboard side, and the dhow pressed starboard. When she moved to port, the dhow moved with her. The wind in their sails never faltered as she drove the dhow a mile off shore. It stuck to her steering even when she left to talk with Gabriel, a roll of sea chart under her arm.

When she unrolled this chart before him, it illuminated frankly unknown continents. It was drawn on a sheet of pale hide that lay heavily over the planks of the deck, undisturbed by the sea breezes. Sweeps of clouds framed the chart where illustrated air spirits blew gentle winds across the sea and the land from the corners of the map.

"We are here," Faiza told him, though it did little help. 'Here' was on still no coast Gabriel recognized. "We are traveling in Hidden Country now."

"I know it," Gabriel said. The Hidden Country was the world beside this one, but he had only been there once before, unwittingly, as a boy. On Faiza's map, the fairy continents lay under deep forests, their thick trees full of the great animals: boar princes with their tusks capped in gold and rubies, rat queens with flaming coats, and unicorn lords, black as midnight and taller than warhorses, that breathed lightning and stomped fire. The dark horse kings over the small, white, and goatish creatures that came to virgins with gleaming bridles on the eves of their betrothals.

Such a unicorn came to Marie the morning they were engaged. Old custom called for new brides to pass a test of trust and purity—to bridle a unicorn. So, as tradition commanded, she waited for it on the green with a crowd of her girl cousins and one still unmarried aunt. They laughed and sang into the trees: "Unicorn! Unicorn! One here's to be married! This is your last chance!" The girls took turns calling the chant, and when the chanting came to Marie and she sang out, the unicorn walked to them from the Brotherhood's Wood. All the girls fell very quiet, and all the menfolk—the groom and his men, the bride's father and his—off the way watching fell quiet too. Gabriel had been by every tree in that Wood as a boy and had never seen the unicorn before. Dainty white flowers bloomed where the white creature stepped with hooves cloven and velvet.

The unicorn touched Marie's cheek with the point of its seashell horn before it took to her bridle sweetly, with a playful nodding of its head. It let her lead it around the green three times, like her own pony. That morning, he smiled as it followed her like a puppy over the pasture, even after she freed it, until it finally tired of maidens and vanished into the Wood again. That unicorn took its pale shimmer from the Hidden Country with it, the Hidden Country that lay on the map before him now. Cities he knew went unmarked while strange citadels sprawled where he knew only barren fields lay or high hills rose. Some blue castle floated in a wall of clouds while a white fortress sat below a mountain.

But in the cold mountains drawn above the forests and the caves rambling beneath them, the strongholds of the Lords of the Shadow rose blackly above the world. The mapmaker shaped their towers to their faces. So, a tall, pale spire clothed in darkness ruled the land of vampires in the north, as a ragged fort hunched like a beast over the ruins of Agharta seized by the werewolves, and a bony, dusty tower pulled above the land of the dead. All their legions crawled below their houses of darkness, tangled armies of creatures. The Lords of Shadow ruled as bleak and terrible in the Hidden Country as they did in his own world. The Hidden Country lay torn around them, shredded where the two lands became one.

But far from the Lords of Shadow, the boundaries of the sea were painted with bottle-green waves, swirled like peppermint wheels. Yellow dolphins jumped from the curls among the red arms of a sea beast with a tentacle in every ocean. The finned backs of water serpents breached alongside islands where fish women bathed. Faiza trailed a path along this strange coast until she stopped and pointed at the subtle curve of a bay. "We will take you here—Aunt is waiting for you here."

"Who is your aunt?"

Faiza sighed and rolled up the sea chart again.

"It's better if Aunt tells you. She'll get mad at me if I do, and her fits scare Jabir."

"Jabir is still asleep," he said. "Should you wake him?"

"No, Jabir will sleep all day—it's better. He stayed up too late playing."

The day passed slowly, and slowly, the land changed: the forests crept close to the sea. The sandy buffs so threaded with roots, they burst out and hung tangled over the waves and rock until the trees receded, the red buffs dissolving into pale shore. For a short while, they even sailed through snow, a deeply cold, white cloud over them. The snowflakes fell softly on the water and faded until it passed. Hour by hour, the beaches grew longer and wider, shoving off the woodlands as black mountains pushed higher and higher above the white sand.

He watched for water serpents and fish women in the gray ocean but saw only seabirds scattered over the cold beach and sea. Still, Gabriel kept alert: catching memories of the coast for Marie. She really was never one for presents, for sleeves of gold or strings of pearls, but she wanted often for little stories, for tales of far places.

Faiza sang while the ship flew by the land, faster and faster, deeper into Hidden Country, as her singing wove with the waves and the calls of sea birds. The air thoroughly chilled over the ocean, the day without a strong sun to warm it, but this didn't worry her, even as wind whipped in her scarf and skirts—until the sky finally grew orange.

"Time to stop," Faiza called out, the brightly colored eyes of the mask hanging on the mast going dark. The wind fell and the hatch flew open, Jabir rushing up the ladder from below deck.

"We've stopped!"

"We've stopped," Faiza told him as she pulled the gold sail down with Gabriel, the rigging sinking quietly over the deck. She left Gabriel to secure it and went to scoop up her brother. "Did you sleep well, little piece of my heart?"

"I dreamed a lot! I dreamed about you, and the water, and the seagulls, and _em-mee_! While you were sailing!"

"What did Uncle do while we were sailing?" Faiza asked, smiling at Gabriel.

"He sat a lot."

"That is very true," Faiza said with a thoughtful face, and Gabriel nodded, tying off the sail. It _was_ very true—the passage left him stiff, tired even as he had done nothing.

"And you sang!" Jabir wiggled and slipped down. "Faiza sings pretty!"

Faiza began to sing again as she built up a cooking fire in a wide, metal dish for a pot of salted lamb, saffron rice, and spices. They ate together once the lamb cooked until the meat was soft and the fat was sweet.

Supper also brought the Ship Cat—a small, black thing that first appeared at morning with a dead mouse in her teeth. She next came to collect formal rations at lunch and returned for the meat due to her now. The dark beggar slinked around Gabriel's boots, to see if he was feeling generous. He was not, particularly, so she permitted him to stroke her shoulders and the pinch of her neck before she crept away to Jabir. The food tasted very good, but Gabriel had no idea where it came from, or how the dhow could passage so safely in winter, or where it kept the Ship Cat or her mice.

Still, Gabriel asked no questions—of girl, boy, or cat. Any questions immediately provoked Faiza's disdain. She was captain of the dhow, and she would tell him what he needed to know, so he left it at that. Her youth and beauty did not seem human-born, her sea chart and her dhow not human-made, and Gabriel learned young not to meddle with hidden folk.

But as he listened, Faiza's singing seemed to call the food, the fair weather, and the cat—though perhaps, the cat came of her own. _'It is a cat,'_ Gabriel reasoned.

Though there was no _mean-spirited_ ghost in the dhow, he couldn't follow Faiza's dreamy songs. They seemed to be all one song yet also seven, or nine, as the melodies clung together like clouds. Faiza sang in her own tongue, flowing from one song into another, as they never grew dull or ensnared in the mind. As the coast shifted with the sea, Gabriel had tried to count them, to pick out their words and find where they began and ended, but the song resisted him. He wasn't alone in this. The songs remained only Faiza's, eluding even Jabir until he went off humming on his own.

When Gabriel stopped trying to draw apart the verses and fell into the lull of listening, images appeared in his mind. Again and again, he saw an empty dhow, much like this one, rocking somehow on the summit of a sand dune, one dune among thousands in a desert, seemingly miles from water. _'A ship in a desert?'_ If he listened hard, he heard the ship creaking in the dry wind, sand sliding over its deck, its gold sail in tatters—

It rocked there for years and years until a being came, her steps burning over the sand. A Jinri—a maiden made by God from smokeless fire at the beginning of the world—

—he knew not how these images found him. He lived in the mountains of Europa all his life, loved them dearly, and never had any wish to leave them. He hadn't even the imagination or want to envision the deserts of Arabia, but they still swept through his mind, their images blowing down his own memories—

But as Faiza sang, he saw these waking dreams all the stronger, brighter, while night fell thick and cold and she sang to dispel the silence hanging over the still water.

"The song is about how Faiza found me," Jabir piped up. "I really like it!"

"You were both alone before then?" Gabriel asked. He knew, perhaps madly, that he knew this from the images the song painted through his mind, their traces of feeling.

Faiza nodded as Jabir settled in her lap.

"Very alone, then the Grace of God led me to Jabir—who could not get down."

"I was stuck," Jabir admitted, sheepishly.

"I will tell you—tell you both!—of how I found Jabir!" Faiza said.

She told them with song, her voice hilting when she sang of how long ago, after God made the angels from pure light and before He made men from clay, God made the Jinn. He made the Jinn from hot winds over flame and smokeless fire. As there were men and women, there were Jinn and Jinri. The Jinn were long-lived and lived in the fire, the air, and the water, but they were not angels, for God made angels the absolute servants of law, ever obedient to His edicts, unable to disobey Him. Jinn He made with free will as He made men. So, Jinn would live as men lived, hearing both the voices of good and of evil, and choosing as they willed. When the end of days came, God too would judge the Jinn as He judged humanity.

Where men and angels obeyed God, Jinn were wily—"But Jinn are not wicked, Jinn are what they are," Faiza promised, because the tribes of Jinn were as many as the seasons, the hours. Like men, they believed what they believed, and some even pledged themselves to God. They were a people great and small. Great Jinn ruled fire, ruled air, and called the wind and storms, while small Jinn protected the houses of men or worried their hearts to trick them into evil. After all, Jinn were what they were, and men had been given God's edicts to follow—"and good men know better than to listen to Jinn whispers!"

But small Jinn were fast and playful. They liked to trick and tease, to play little games on unlucky men who could not see them. Small Jinn took up in man's artifacts: possessing them and breathing life into rusty swords, dark lamps, and empty ships—

—and Gabriel saw the little ship buried in the spine of the dune, a little, lost ship possessed by a little, lost Jinn. This little Jinn lived alone in the rocking dhow, too small to escape and too small to live without it. A cruel storm had thrown the dhow up from the sea and left on the summit of the dune. So, the dhow rocked and creaked, year after year, until a great Jinri, her form a tossing flame, found the little Jinn's dhow. The great Jinri watched it sway and listened to its Jinn's little weeping.

"And I could not leave someone so little and crying!" Faiza said over his giggling as she tickled Jabir: "So, I called the wind to carry him down, to the shore, and now, he can never escape me!"

As she said it, the wind flew over the sands in Gabriel's mind's eye, shoving against the moored ship until it slid down the dune to a line of shore where the waves caught it graciously. It bobbed on the blue tide until the Jinri came—

—and after that, they became the dearest of friends, family, and they went sailing ever on for all of their days—

Gabriel smiled at them: "The Grace of God led me to my family too."

"Then you must tell us! Tell us about how you found your family!" Faiza said, her eyes lighting up, as Jabir almost fell from her lap as leaned with her.

"Tell us! Tell us!" Jabir said too. "Is your family your horse?"

Gabriel laughed out loud.

"No! He is a very good horse, but this story is not about him."

 _— — —_

 _Some notes: Arabic is a beautiful language with lovely honorifics. I've tried to capture some of that beauty here. 'Khle' means 'aunt,' and 'Em-mee' means 'uncle' in in the Arabic dialect I've referenced (which is spoken in Iran). These are respectful honorifics used by children for adults (who aren't always in their family). When Faiza refers to Jabir as 'little piece of my heart,' she is using a very loving honorific for a sibling. I Romanized it for ease of reading. These two OC's are dear to my heart, because the cast of Records gets pretty white. In my original work, I'm used to writing more characters who are POC, but CV:LoS doesn't really have any. So, I made some up. :)_

 _I did not embellish the Jinn mythos, and I've retold it here pretty straight from its origins. To be perfectly honest, though Faiza wears a scarf, I don't get the sense she is wearing hijab or even is Muslim (at least at this point in her life). Jinn do have the choice, just like men. From what I've researched, it sounds like some are Muslim, but many are not—which is why Faiza doesn't commit to portraying them as 'wicked' in her story._

 _The particular nose ring she wears, the pearl shaped into a rose, is a reference to 'The Fisherman and His Soul,' Oscar Wilde's rebuttal to Hans Christian Anderson's 'The Little Mermaid'. The Prince abandoning the Mermaid apparently pissed him off too._

 _Now that you probably know too much about what I do with my English degrees in my spare time, I wanna thank you for reading, favorite reader! - SM_


	7. The Tale of the Apple Wood

_Disclaimer: Same song and dance. I don't own CV:LoS and make no profit from this story. This fic references folklore and fairy tales._

 _The reason we are posting chs. 5 and 6 together is because ch. 6 only has 2,000 (or so) words of new content. Ch. 6 is the natural home of 'The Apple Wood', an except already posted in December 2015. The two versions are not entirely the same. It has been edited, and Beta wanted to see a little more info about Gabe's life. So, that detail's been added, and I smoothed out a verbal altercation between two of the characters. Some of the OCs may also set off different bells if you are a careful reader, but the revisions are still minor, IMHO. If you want to read it again in its natural context, thank you, you are lovely, and I adore you._

 _But if you don't want to read The Apple Wood again, I understand. Please use the Crtl+F feature on your browser to search these words: '_ Gabriel echoed the closing notes'. _This phrase will take you to the new content._

 _Warning: Contains casual human cruelty in a medieval setting, or casual writer cruelty in a medieval setting. Whateva you wanna call it._

 **Chapter 6—The Tale of the Apple Wood**

 ** _Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme_**

God showed Himself to the world in sunbursts, in falls of light streaking through clouds over the fields, the woods, the mountains; and one day, God showed Himself only to Gabriel.

Or so He seemed to, as the boy rested in a copse of trees overlooking the highlands. The Brotherhood of Light's compound lay further up the mountainside, while the village lay below, but the sunburst broke over all. In the stillness of the wilderness, the land had been made holy, silent, and golden, so peaceful and solitary, as if no people were left in the hills but him.

Gabriel dropped his pack of tinder-wood and stopped to rest awhile, to watch the sunburst as if it _was_ only for him—since he was an orphan, a foundling under the Brotherhood's gates, and had no father left in the world but God. The Grace of God, in those rays of light, fanned through broken clouds as they swept across the sky. Fine arrows of sun slid from the Brotherhood's Wood to the apple wood below, where the fruit already began to swell and redden. It had been a good summer, and the fields glowed for it, flax fields over the dale turning pale as snow with their yield.

He wandered this whole wood, from the compound to this copse, but never had he wandered down to the apple wood. Supposedly, the trees of the orchard belonged to someone. Though it was hard for him to imagine the land really belonging to anyone, but he was still small. The world of adults had its mysteries yet—land, laws, ownership—and Gabriel owned almost nothing. His little book of prayers, his little bed, his little clothes, and his little job were all gifts of godly men's charity to the miserable ones. If he left the Brotherhood, he would leave these things for another boy behind him. He earned wages for his wood-picking, a half-copper a day, but Father Achim kept them, for when he was grown and had to find his own trade, if the Brotherhood didn't keep him for squire—

—He wanted badly to be squire, and he sulked a spell, remembering blood doting brightly on his tunic, from fights he'd been in with the other boys— _again—_

But Gabriel had finished his gathering for the day early and had two hours still before he needed to return, or else get hell and a beating from the grounds master for his lateness. So, Gabriel followed the Grace of God into the trees of the Apple Wood—

—and found a girl crying there.

She seemed a few years younger than him, perhaps seven, and she did not just sob. She threw a _regal_ fit—stamping her dainty foot, red in the face, just crying in anger at the trees—and someone up in the branches who seemed to be _laughing_ at her.

"You—you are so mean!" the girl wailed from the ground before she wiped her eyes again.

"I don't care, Marie!" said a boy's voice from up in the tree. "I'm not helping you climb up—"

"Then come down!" she shouted. "It's—it's not fair, Mathias! I wanna see the nest too—"

The boy in the tree _was_ his age—and Lord if Gabriel knew how _he_ got up there. He watched this boy through the leaves from the ground, this boy in his velvet doublet, his linen shirt, his good breeches, and his shiny boots. The both of them had very fine clothes, and the little girl was clearly grounded not for lack of climbing skill, but for the cumbersome skirts of the little orange gown and tiny white cape she wore. The children were especially caught in themselves and did not at all hear him coming.

"How come you won't help her up?" Gabriel interrupted. The little girl startled out of her crying while the boy swayed dangerously in the branches.

"Bloody hell!" the boy said with the awkward anger of someone still learning the first order of taking such oaths. "Where did you come from—"

"How come you won't help her up?"

"She'll fall, stupid," the boy said—to them both, really. "She's real clumsy—" This did not help her hurt feelings any, and she began to sniffle again.

"You're making her cry saying stuff like that," Gabriel told the boy in the tree. "She just wants to see too—" The richly-dressed boy rolled his eyes at them, said no more, and climbed some branches higher. Gabriel frowned and looked at the girl. It _wasn't_ fair—who could climb in a dress like that? "Can—can you hang on?"

She stopped crying to gape at him.

"I'll—I'll carry you," he said, getting down on one knee. "You hang on—c'mon." She climbed up on his back and wrapped her arms around his neck without a word before he hiked her up easily—she weighing no more than a heavy pack of tinder anyway. Climbing would be a bit of something, but Gabriel was good at climbing. He hopped up the trunk to hang at the first branch, and she squeaked and grabbed him tighter, almost throttling him—

"We're—not—falling—" he managed through her squeezing, and she loosened her hold, gripping his sides with her knees instead. He climbed faster, carrying her higher, the skirt of the orange gown catching in the fingers of the littler branches—as the boy already in the tree watched them.

"You're both mad, and stupid," he said as Gabriel reached him. He settled the girl on the thick branch where the other boy waited. "How is she going to get down?"

"I'll carry her down," Gabriel told him. The little one, however, was smiling, even with the gold hem of her dress torn.

"Thank you," she said, playing with one of her dark braids while they rested. Her friend frowned.

"Well, it's up here," he said, climbing a little higher, and Gabriel followed, helping the girl after him.

"I am Mathias," the boy told him primly. "The runt is Marie," who looked quite upset when Mathias said this and she cried over Gabriel's shoulder: "So mean! I am not a runt—I'm not—"

"I have to play with her," Mathias told Gabriel in a low and very put-on voice. "It is my punishment for being born before her. Being eldest is such a chore."

" _Mathias_ —" Marie cried.

"Let her see the nest now," Gabriel said, and Mathias scooted aside on the branch.

"Go ahead, girls first," he said and Marie leaned forward, her face brightening at the sight of three eggs, speckled and blue, in a tidy nest.

"They aren't hatched yet," she said to Mathias. "They really aren't hatched yet, Mathias! They're so pretty and blue—"

"I was going to bring one down for you, but with you carrying on like that—I couldn't leave you—"

"You shouldn't touch them at all," Gabriel said. "She won't come back to them." And Marie immediately put her hands behind her back and then began to forget the nest.

"What is your name?" she asked.

"You've seen it," Gabriel told her instead. "We should go down now—"

"But I asked your name," she said again, and still, Gabriel said nothing. Rich children probably shouldn't know his name—for _his_ own sake—and so to was the afternoon passing. This idle time before he was due back to the compound burned quickly. If he dallied too long, the grounds master would learn him for his tardiness with bruises.

"Let's go," Gabriel told her as he helped her on his back again, her arms were more relaxed this time as he anchored them against the tree.

"Is your name Alfred?" she asked. He shot her a look over his shoulder.

"No—"

"Cornelius?"

"Why would my name be 'Cornelius'?" Gabriel said this with unnecessary disgust as he knew a Cornelius back at the compound—who was a prick. (Gabriel was a bit more learned in the practical craft of foul words than a boy of Mathias's blood.)

"You will not tell me your name—what else am I to do?"

Mathias had followed them down the opposite side of the trunk.

"Yes, what else are we to do?" Mathias agreed. "Where did you come from anyhow?"

"I have to go—" Gabriel said as he let Marie down. She sped from him and set her dress to rights over the roots of the apple tree, tucking the tattered hem out of sight.

"Did you come from the Brotherhood compound?" Mathias asked anyway.

"He said he wants to go, Mathias—let him be," Marie scolded. "Thank you for carrying me up and down the tree, Nameless one! I hope we meet again!" It became apparent at this moment that Marie was not seven, and Mathias had been blunt but correct in calling her _undersized_.

Mathias ignored her and marched between them.

"I am Lord Mathias Cronqvist—the Prince is my father. I command you, boy: tell me your name and if you are from the compound, or I will have you arrested."

" _Mathias!_ " Marie cried, while Gabriel only scowled. Since he had been found, Gabriel owned almost nothing. Even his name was a token of charity, and this Mathias spoke to him, so rough, and wealthy, and self-important. Just as Cornelius did, just as all those other boys, the sons of knights with illustrious names to carry. Boys who were already squires, boys who did not have to pray where wishes failed. It didn't matter when _they_ got into fights, or shoved lesser boys around—what punishment came heavy on the heads of sons of knights?

So, those words cut lines from him that might have otherwise held him back—

—and the orchard was empty but for them and the trees. Gabriel faced Mathias head-on, their foreheads nearly touching.

"Who is going to come and arrest me, princeling? Your father isn't here—"

Mathias pulled back. "How _dare_ —"

" _Nameless one_!" Marie chided him too, coming between them. "No fighting! Mathias, _stop it_ —we go—"

"But Marie, don't you want to see the Brotherhood compound? If he's from the compound, he could take us—"

"Oh, I do want to see that!" she said after a pause to consider it. "But he said 'no'—"

"She wants to see it too," Mathias said over her. "If you are from the compound, you should tell us so—"

"—Or you'll arrest me?"

"Well, only if you keep saying 'no'—if you just took us—"

"I'm not taking you to the compound—"

"So, you _are_ from the compound," Mathias concluded. "Now, what _is_ your name?"

"You two—don't need to know my name—"

"I suppose," Marie said, "but it feels ever so rude not to—"

"I'm leaving," Gabriel said, almost running from them to the edge of the orchard closest to the Brotherhood's Wood. "Go home." He re-shouldered his pack of tinder, headed out over the field, and found they followed him—and he could have no doubt at all it was them by their bickering. They led a black pony with them—the little prince's mount, its saddle hung with a long dagger in a jeweled scabbard. The pony bore the children and their bickering with the patience of a saintly mother.

The two bickered up the hills and down them again. At first, they bickered about who would ride the pony, and in what turn, before they ended up both walking alongside the little horse and bickering about following Gabriel. Before too long, they bickered about wanting to see the Brotherhood compound when their fathers had forbade it, and then, they bickered about what precisely their fathers would do to them when they found out they had gone to the compound anyway. They pointedly did not bicker about if they should have woken 'Milly' and told her where they were off to. But still, they were not done. The girl started the bickering as often as the boy did, and as each disagreement came near its end, they started anew. But if the boy ever disagreed too stiffly, the girl threatened tears.

When they found nothing more to bicker about their fathers or their fates, they bickered about if the trees overhead were oak or sycamore, if the flowers growing in the Wood's shade were goldenrod or yarrow, if the apples were still too sour or just ripe enough to eat—

—and about this time, they caught up to him—and they bickered still about apples because Mathias had nicked three from the orchard. To Marie, he gave the reddest of the lot, the greenest he kept for himself, and to Gabriel, he offered a warm, yellow apple and said:

"So, how far to the compound, Nameless?"

Gabriel did not take the apple: "I'm not taking you to the compound. Stop following me."

"That is a shame," Mathias said, giving the refused apple to Marie instead. "Because we are going to the compound—with you. Lead on!"

He trudged on; they followed. They followed and they bickered—about if Marie had torn her dress, or if the tree had, if a rustle in the brush was a rabbit or a fox—and Gabriel began to realize their bickering was a kind of game. They handed the unending argument off to one another, in turns nearly, until he could count their passes like beats in a tune. They seemed to be dear friends somehow in this. He had never imagined a friendship built so on bickering, but he hadn't much imagined friends. Children at the compound were few; many were older than him and already swept into the ranks of squires. They had their work, and so had he. When there wasn't wood to pick, Cook kept him in to pluck a goose or peel potatoes until his hands ached, his fingers full of nicks. Sometimes, he got to train with the recruited boys, but less and less so lately—after he broke Cornelius's nose—

"What do you do at the compound, Nameless?" Marie started, seeking to draw him into the circle of her, Mathias, and the pony. "Are you a squire?"

"I pick wood," Gabriel said sullenly, and Marie balked.

"Oh, well, that is very interesting—"

"That is _not_ interesting—"

" _Mathias!_ "

"Why are you not a squire?" Mathias demanded. "You are old enough—"

"I'm not," Gabriel said. "I'm just—not."

"I think it is because you are bad-tempered," Mathias told him, and Gabriel saw only red and the woods, not hearing Marie chiding Mathias again. He stopped in his trudging, turned on Mathias, and growled:

"I am not _bad-tempered_ —"

"Oh, are you not!" Mathias laughed at him, as he had at Marie, and Gabriel put his back to him and marched. "So, how far to the compound—"

"Yes, how far?" Marie asked, a quake in her voice. "It is getting dark."

It was getting dark; the Wood around them spooked by shadows, suddenly strange.

"Nameless, are you lost?" Mathias asked.

"No, I'm not," Gabriel insisted, "you can see the lights of the compound there." He pointed through the trees at the lights through the leaves and the faintest lines of the red fort, and Marie sighed, relieved. Mathias climbed up on his pony.

"We are still out too far, we won't make it before dark," he said. "I will ride ahead for aid—"

"Mathias—" Marie attempted, but Mathias stood for none of it.

"Look after Marie, Nameless—I'll return soon!"

And he left them, the pony pacing well for such a sleepy animal.

"He is going the wrong way, your friend," Gabriel said to Marie when he was gone.

"Will he be all right?"

"Yeah, the road is still that way, but the compound is—" Gabriel stopped.

The lights had gone. Where the gold windows and lanterns of the Brotherhood's compound had glowed was only trees and trees, patches of paling sky flitting in the summer leaves.

"What's the matter?" she asked. He didn't speak, and the moment he looked back, the lights returned, hanging like will-o-wisps in the trees and coming closer.

"Nothing," Gabriel said, "let's walk—"

Marie grabbed his arm quite suddenly: "What's on the ground?"

Gabriel looked down with her, and serpentine lines appeared in the beaten path beneath their feet. Curling cracks slithered through the earth, meeting and drawing— _'flowers?'_ and leaves and beasts in the dust, all over the path, until the markings wove themselves as thick and intricate as Persian carpets.

"It's beautiful," Marie said. "But what is it—"

Then, there came the sound of bells, and all too soon, it came again, a crisp, cold ringing—

"Get off the road," Gabriel said. He tossed his pack away and shoved her toward the brush. "It's the Host— _Move_ —"

They crashed into the brush as floating motes of light, fey lights, began to drift among the branches, catching in whirls around sprigs, and still sang the bells—

"Move," Gabriel whispered desperately. "Be quiet—be _so_ quiet—"

They crawled deep in the thicket until they came under an old tree, where the roots had hollowed a cave beneath it. Gabriel hurried her inside and slid in after her—the swift-falling evening full of fey lights, like fallen stars. They caught in his hair like troublesome dust, and he pawed them out.

And still sang the bells.

"What if Mathias comes back?" Marie whispered.

"He'll be fine, they can't find him," Gabriel told her. Mathias, with all luck, had probably found the road to the compound while the arrival of the Fairy Host had tripped them into the hidden country. Gabriel knew the Host; everyone knew the Host, even if only as a terror in poetry—they were _'people-snatchers,'_ from the other world. Their ghostly parade often passed through the Brotherhood's Wood in summer, but he was rarely out of doors at dusk. "We just—have to hide until morning. They'll go then."

Marie drew closer to him. "I'm frightened—"

"Don't talk," was all Gabriel said. The Host was perfectly frightful. He pulled her down until they huddled low in the root cave, the children clutching to each other as still sang the bells.

They sang in such even strokes as church bells while figures hooded and cloaked, the vanguard of the Host, walked the carved fairy path. They carried staves roped in silver bells that they struck on the packed earth with each stride taken, ringing every step of the Host—

Other music-makers walked among the Host, a harper and a strolling fiddler; somewhere, further off, a sharp fifer—

—until there came a squad of red horses ridden by veiled women in red gowns. They carried golden bows and quivers of silver arrows with garnet heads—

—and last in the Host, last behind them came a final woman, she too in red, she too veiled, but wearing a crown of red maple and oak leaves and a golden mask. She, the Lady of the Fairy, the Lady of the Host, rode in a chariot of twisted birchwood. Gabriel knew the fateful clatter of her wheels from cold tales, her chariot driven by a team of twelve foxes, as red in fur as her gown, their strange harnesses too strung with bells—

This lady pulled on her reins, the racket of her wheels stilling, as she called out to her host, her voice ghostly: "I hear the breathing of human children—on my road."

Gabriel gasped sharply, and Marie squeaked, and they both covered each other's mouths with their hands, to stop their noise, and huddled deeper in the root cave.

"Find them," the Lady of the Host commanded, and her maiden knights dismounted and broke into the woods. "All of you—search. Bring the little ones here." And at her word, all the ramblers in the Host left the fairy road to hunt. Her foxes even stalked among them, dipping their dark noses in the underbrush and snuffing without a sound.

Marie buried her face in Gabriel's collar, her hot tears on his neck. He hugged her closer, almost grateful for her hand over his mouth—keeping him still—

—as a fairy torch spilled into their grove, its light liquid on the dark roots, and the Host's fiddler walked over the roots of their tree, their hiding place. His shadow hung distorted over the mouth of their cave, the silent instrument slung over his shoulder making a monster of him—

And he began to sing, to sing and to play, as he walked, as he searched—his voice low, a soft and elven calling—his fiddle a phantom whistling—

"Don't listen," Gabriel whispered against Marie's ear. "Don't listen to it—" She had stopped crying, and they held onto each other. But even as he knew what would save them, the fiddler's voice came singing, warm in his ears—and he began to listen to the words—

 _"_ _Come away, o human child,_ " he sang, his fiddle crooning with him. " _To her waters, and her wild. With the Lady, hand in hand, from this world more full of weepin' than you understand—_ " His voice blurred with others and together softly begged—" _Come away, come away, o human child"_ —as if it were not only the fiddler singing to him gently, but all the ramblers walking in the trees—their voices in the shivering leaves, on the breath of breezes, in the white starlight adrift with fey lights, pale green and traveling, under the night.

And at the heart of their voices was the Lady of the Fairy Host. Her song tempted him with childhood that never ended, every day forever sweet and summer, young and painless, where nothing and no one would dare to strike him or make him cry, for no tears ever fell on the far, fair isle where he would finally have a mother, queenly and eternal—her warm embrace, her silken lap, her velvet hands—a mother who would love him as she loved _nothing_ —

Marie hugged him so tight, Gabriel almost lost his breath, and she whispered to him, very small:

"Oh, please— _please_ don't listen—"

The root cave seemed darker, duller than it had been, the fairy torch lying on its far wall like exotic gold.

"I—I wasn't," Gabriel lied—and shamefully, he knew she knew it. She did not let him go. Above them, the beguiling song stopped, and the fiddler rested his bow.

Both children held their breath—and waited—as they heard him kneel, the litter of the woods settling as he did—his torch sinking low to the ground. With as little sound as he could manage, Gabriel dragged Marie back from the light—

"What did you find?" came the chilling voice of the Lady of the Host in the grove. The fiddler rose from the mouth of the cave at her approach.

"Nothing," he said and played three notes from his piece, the shadow of his bow spiking against the wall of the root cave, and then three more—for six drops of sweetest song. The motes of light in the air jittered with the little tune. All the faint melody in the wood seemed suddenly harmless, its cruel charms laid low.

"Nothing?" she asked, unmoved by his music. "How find you no _thing_?"

"I found _things_ , my lady," he told her drolly. "Dust—leaves—a crow carcass—but I found _no one_."

"But I heard you singing my song, and all the voices of the Host rose up with you—"

"I thought they might be hiding, so I sang out to them, but _no one_ came."

"Search a last time," she commanded before she said with tenderness: "Then, you come back to me, my Thomas. I will have you play for me as we travel tonight."

"As my lady wishes," the fiddler said and pulled more notes—his music pinching sweetness into the still grove as he circled once—passing over the dark hole of the root cave—before he and his torch light slid away. All the ramblers returned to the road, their music straying back with them from the trees, as the bells began to sing, step by step, leading the Host away through the woods.

Gabriel collapsed on the floor of the root cave, gasping, until Marie let him go and he sat up. Even as the Host had moved on, their fairy lights remained, drifting over the cave mouth.

"Do—do we stay?" Marie asked, and he nodded.

"Till morning—when the fey lights go away."

"That is a long time," Marie said and took the yellow apple from a pocket in her skirts. "You should eat." He ate, and she sat quietly, watching the fey lights meet in spirals and turning circles under the tree. Cold crept in with the night, and they huddled together for warmth in the dark. Marie stretched her white cape over both of them, and the lull of sleep came with the velvet, soft and light as a cloud.

"You saved me, Nameless," Marie said drowsily. "Thank you." Their heads leaned together as the night thickened. "I won't tell Mathias your name if you tell me—I promise."

"I'm called Gabriel."

"I'm called Marie."

"I know that," he said, almost smiling—after all, Mathias had said _"The runt is Marie,"_ but he did not echo this—though she seemed to hear it again all the same. She wriggled under the cape.

"I have to play with him!" Marie said mockingly, putting her nose in the air. "It is my punishment for being born after him! Being youngest is such a chore! But he is my friend; he _knows_ it!"

Gabriel chuckled, the smile coming through at last. "He is your friend—"

"You are my friend too! You saved me," she said at once before smiling very warmly with sleep coming over her eyes, her head heavier on his shoulder. "Good night, Gabriel."

"Good night, Marie," he told her. The moon came out over the grove, its beams full of the Wood's shadows, rustling. The fey lights caught in the moonlight winked out like stars. It grew quieter still, with only their small breathing. Gabriel ached to recall the fiddler's golden song, a hollow hurt fresh in his chest from its promises—of happiness, of mother, of a far, fair isle without tears—but he said anyway, even if she slept: "You saved me too."

— — —

Morning woke Gabriel—rudely—some hours later, when Sirs Phillip and Erich of the Brotherhood of Light fished the children from the root cave. Sir Phillip set him standing and clopped him on the shoulder.

"You are not Cornelius, eh, Gabriel?"

He was quiet, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The sky was still deeply blue, birds just waking.

"I'm not—"

"Nor Alfred," Marie said from up on Sir Erich's horse. She sat wrapped in Sir Erich's heavy cloak, looking very small in it.

"Well, young Lord Cronqvist said Voclain's granddaughter was in the woods in the care of a wood-picker who was _not_ Cornelius."

"I think this quite fits his description," Sir Erich said, climbing up behind Marie, so she looked smaller still, and tired, beside the big man. There were fey lights still adrift, on the cusp of dawn, and they clung in Marie's curly, dark hair. "I'll be taking little Miss Voclain back now. I suspect she is _sorely_ missed. A good morning to you, Phillip! Gabriel!"

"Aye, a good morning," Sir Phillip said. "Gabriel and I shall be true brothers and walk back!"

"Now, you boys aren't far," Sir Erich told them, his horse stepping as lingering fey lights fretted around her.

"Good bye, Gabriel," Marie called from the height of the great horse. "We'll meet again!"

"Good bye," he said. The markings left by the Fairy Host's passage still lay in the trail underneath him. Dawn would dust them away soon, and all would be as if the Hidden folk had never passed by. But as Sir Erich's horse nickered and set down the mountain to the village, Gabriel had the sense there were other hidden countries in the world than what came over the forest the past night. That the doors to those hidden countries opened only once in a man's life—before they shut forever.

And that Marie was going back to one such hidden country.

He hoped he would see her again despite, as Sir Phillip took them briskly up the mountain again.

"That was good sense, Gabriel," Sir Phillip said, his hand on his shoulder again, heavier this time. "Very good sense. You did very well."

"Thank you, sir."

Sir Phillip held Gabriel by the shoulder until he stopped on the path.

"Do you know what the little prince told us about you?"

"That he was going to have me arrested?"

Sir Phillip laughed. "He's the _very_ kind, isn't he! But no, not that—he said you should be made squire for your 'services' to Miss Voclain." Gabriel kept very still as Sir Phillip spoke, as if to interrupt the knight was to interrupt a dream he was still having in the root cave. "Now, the word of a little prince is mighty, but I think it time, don't you?"

"Time—to be squire?"

"Aye, I do think it time. I think you've been left to Cook more for our sakes than for yours." Sir Phillip ruffled Gabriel's hair. "If you will have me, I will have you—for squire."

"Y-you would?"

"I would—but what say you?"

"Yes, Sir Phillip, yes!"

"Right! Let's get on then, and breakfast! Today," Sir Phillip said, with a touch of the fiendishness he reserved for new recruits, "will be a long day for you."

"I'm ready!" Gabriel promised, and they set on the path again with knights' pacing.

— — —

Gabriel echoed the closing notes of the tale of the Jinri and the Ship to Faiza and Jabir as he finished: "And after that, we became the dearest of friends, and once I find the Acre, she will become my wife, my family."

Jabir dozed against Faiza's knee and she roused him as she stood to put a hand on Gabriel's shoulder. The light of the cooking fire in its pan flickered across the deck. The night clouds had cleared, the dark sky full with the waning moon.

"That was a good story," Faiza told him, grinning as half her face seemed firelight. "We know what it's like to wander the world so alone. We will see you to the Acre, mister! We will see you to your family!"

Gabriel returned her smile. "Thank you, Faiza."

She left her hand lingering, her face serious.

"It won't be much longer now," she said. "We will see it tomorrow, by morning—there will be a storm. I will need your help."

"You have it," he told the captain of the dhow—without hesitation. Faiza asked Gabriel to sleep first and take the second watch, and he did, a gray dawn rolling on them the next morning. There seemed no sunrise but for a blotting of bloody clouds to the east.

"There will be a storm," Faiza said, watching the sun struggle in the gloom. The dhow drifted on the edge of the storm, and on the horizon, lightning struck the sea, coursing light through the waves. "Are you ready?"

Once Gabriel nodded, Faiza seemed satisfied, and he left her standing on deck for one last visit to the galley. Even as the morning sky churned sickly, below deck was still restful darkness—peaceful, sleeping. Jabir has supposedly already gone to sleep down there before Gabriel woke, but the galley was empty. When he set foot to plank, a boy's steps ran fast ahead of him, without a body, and something shapeless lingered in the far shadow. It didn't laugh. When Gabriel reached out to touch the hull again, he did not feel the light-heartedness he had before: the ship's heart was the same, but now, it beat determined.

And the spirit of the dhow whispered to him: _Em-mee, I'm ready too!_

Gabriel smiled and told the little dhow: "Then be brave. Protect your sister."

 _Yes! I will!_ replied the little voice at once, and that said, Gabriel climbed back on deck where Faiza braced herself at the bow. The golden sail overhead swelled, bright as dawn on the graying sky, and she pressed the dhow against the worsening sea.

All at once, the storm came—slapping the deck with rain. The dhow cut over the ocean all the faster, slicing through the wind. Faiza called Gabriel to the bow with a waving of her hand.

"There," she said over the rain. Her scarf clung to the wet darkness of her hair as she pointed to what remained of the shore in the storm. "Where it is darkest. That is the storm—that is where the Acre is."

"I see it," he told her. "I'm ready."

"Good—help me now. Lower the sail, and I will steer. It will take all my concentration. Tell me if—tell me if the ship is not safe." He nodded and brought the gold sail down as Faiza leaned hard to the starboard side of the bow and drove the dhow. Gabriel tied off the sail while the boat soared, skipping through waves crashing against its sides. Day faded with each breaker, lightning flashing over the deck pounded by rain—

His eyes stung and he clung to the mast as Faiza did not waver, even as heavier darkness fell and the wind ripped her amber scarf away. The long braid of her dark hair lashed in the storm, and she forced the dhow on. The sea broke over the ship, the hull shuddering, nearly sweeping Gabriel away—

—he caught himself against the stern wall, the rain striking his back like sheets of nails—and he looked down at the stern—

—the stern tattering in the water—the stitching holding its planks together shredding—sea water bleeding in the seams—

He turned and fought the storm across the deck to Faiza's side, its din so powerful, so living a force, he barely heard himself over the roaring of wind and wave—he grabbed her shoulder hard—

 _"_ _Faiza—the stern—the stern is tearing—"_

He felt her go cold and rigid under his hand—her eyes suddenly frantic.

 _"_ _It can't—we're—we're not close enough!—"_ she leaned over the railing and shouted into the wet wind: _"Hold on! Please, we promised! Hold on!"_ The dhow groaned deeply, the deck slanting toward the stern. Gabriel took Faiza by both shoulders and turned her round from the bow.

 _"_ _Turn the ship back,"_ he shouted. _"I'll go my own way!"_

 _"_ _But you will drown—"_

 _"_ _Go!"_

She watched him in the rain before she took the wound whip from her belt and pressed it in his hands.

 _"_ _Take this! If you take nothing else, take this! Peace go with you, Gabriel!"_

Without another look more, she dashed away from him in the rain to the ruining stern. Gabriel felt the dhow pitch and begin to slide back through the churning water—and slide _fast_ —

He stripped himself of gauntlets, greaves, and breastplate. His armor, heavy metal, slid away along the deck with the downward sink of the stern as he climbed onto the railing, left with little more than trousers and Faiza's whip on his belt. Rain lashed his skin, the water beneath him twisting—

But already, it lightened, the wind quieted—the black eye of the storm, where the Acre lay, slipping away. Gabriel hesitated only a heartbeat over the waves—and dived.

— — —

During the course of his telling, Dracul and the Librarian had settled in the office, she in the chair at the desk and he pacing within the tight shelves. As he spoke, his eyes roamed over the manuscripts sealed behind glass—

—until he stopped, and his pause lengthened, and he looked into one shelf with such intensity, his eyes burned, his irises flashing dark and redly as Alucard's spell crackled.

The Dracul Archive abruptly grew cold and quiet.

"And what after?" the Librarian prompted him mildly.

Dracul ignored her, leaning on the glass.

"Why are these here?" he asked heavily. On the other side of the glass was a set of slim, leather-bound, and tiny books. Untitled and black, they boxed together, each indistinguishable from its sisters. They were unmarked but a label on their shelf identified them as the 'VARENHEID JOURNALS'.

The Librarian stood up from her chair. "What do you—"

" _I asked you_ ," Dracul growled as he reached back and smashed the glass casing open, glass and blood streaking the side of his fist as he grabbed the first of the little books and turned on the Librarian—towering, terrible, and in a rage. "Why are _these_ here?" he started again, his voice distorted, the voice of the Dragon, fangs bared in every violent word. Blood ran from his fingers, the wounds healing and dropping shards of glass that had lodged in him. "Why do _you_ have _them_?"

The Librarian drew back from him until she pressed against her own books, the glass rattling and ancient texts trembling behind her—but Dracul came ever closer, looming— _close, too close_ —as she steadied herself against the shelf, left with no light in his immense shadow. The air smelt suddenly of fire and ash—and blood.

"I told you," the Librarian said carefully. "We needed to study you—"

"So you would study _these_! You—"

He put a hand to her throat and didn't even feel the warmth of her skin or the frantic throb of her pulse racing with his danger—

—before all went instantly dark.

The Dracul Librarian was gone; the Dracul Archive was gone; a desert of solitary darkness stretched in all directions. The bald bulb in the little office appeared to have retreated far up in a black sky, where it glowed like a distant moon. He had lost Alucard's glamour in coming to this place and looked down at his own stone-pale hands and black claws, his own red coat.

The ground shook beneath him, the nothingness seemed to tremble, as a great claw came down around Dracul, leaving him standing between the long hooks—of a red, horned dragon—the very beast that had guarded the Archive door made magnificent and ungodly huge.

"Is there a problem, sir?" the red dragon began amicably, curls of orange smoke about its teeth and whiskers—miles above Dracul. Dracul noted this duly and tucked the little book out of harm's way in his red coat.

"The Librarian and I were having a conversation," Dracul said.

"And we encourage our patrons to bring any and all questions to the staff's attention. Servitude _is_ a founding tenant of this institute." The dragon raked its claws through the ground, tearing up the earth as Dracul leapt from him. "But the Dracul Archive is a place of learning, sir. If you continue to carry on so and intimidate the Librarian, you will pose a detriment to others' learning—and you will be removed from the premises."

Dracul caught the threat.

"You are bigger than me," he conceded to the Archive Guardian. Even fully changed, he would still be—small, "But the bigger they are."

The dragon grinned, toothy and reptilian.

"I am whatever is required to kill you, sir." And the moment it spoke, a storm of red smoke rushed through the blackness, tearing at Dracul's coat and spraying him with jet sand, as the dragon condensed, tightening into a tiny form, gray and red-eyed—

—and Simon Belmont—

—armed with not just any battle cross, no mere Gandolfi replica, but _the_ genuine article—his weapon smelling even of Heaven's blessing and the Shadow Realm it had been shattered on—

"That is a trick," Dracul conceded again. "How did you come by that?"

The Archive Guardian smiled—with Simon's mouth, Simon's streak of arrogance—or perhaps entirely its own.

"What do they say in that oh-so-green film? 'Your mind makes it real'?"

"I don't know that," Dracul admitted starkly.

"Much more important people than you— _do_ ," the guardian told him haughtily and then, in annoyance: " _In brief_ , when I said I was whatever is required to kill you, sir, your neural impulses told me and my systems what would."

Frankly, Dracul did not know what neural impulses were either. It sounded like soul made science—or a dragon made computer, apparently. Before he could reply, strong arms locked him from behind, wrenched his arms back, exposed his chest—his heart. He struggled against the stone grip, throwing his head back and slacking as he looked into the gray, red-eyed face of his own son, who spoke too with the voice of the Archive Guardian as Simon advanced, the Combat Cross at ready.

"This is your only warning, sir. I want you to understand _fully_ —" As Alucard, the Archive Guardian tightened his hold, shocks of pain in Dracul's joints. "—what becomes of those who disturb this learning environment." Dracul twisted, jerking back to the front where Simon reared back, pulling the cross up and driving it down—

—and all was light again.

As light as the Dracul Archive offered.

The Librarian seemed to be gone still, and he was alone with the books. As he 'returned', Alucard's glamour melted away his vampiric traits again, but the little book was still in his coat. He shook off his disorientation and went to the shelf where he'd first found it: the glass casing appeared undisturbed, as if he had never shattered it, but the rest of the tiny books were gone. Dracul punched the case with the side of his fist, spreading a web of cracks that soon shuddered and reformed as he turned and trudged to the Archive gate.

It was open, and not too far away in the dark, the Dracul Librarian waited for him at the foot of the stairs back up to the National Library. Light glowed from the top of the stairs—the sealed door had opened.

Alucard would never forgive him if he killed her. That was Alucard's only rule, his only condition, for bringing him here in the first place: "Harm no one," his son had said and made him swear to it. His oath was all that stood between that woman and complete death.

Perhaps she even knew it, but it did not stop her from speaking.

"I have made a special accommodation to allow you to borrow that item," the Librarian said when he reached her. If anything had shaken her, the mask hid it. She ruled the Archive again—as she had ruled the car, the airport sidewalk—Dracul sneered. This arrogant human bitch who turned through the pages of _those_ books—as if they were any other 'item' in her 'collection'—

"You are not _allowing_ me anything," he snarled at her. "It's _mine._ "

She faced him resiliently, fearless with the might of that red brute at her beck and whim.

"Please take care reading it. It is very old and delicate—"

"I will do what I want with it— _it belongs to me_ —"

"Be especially careful, or the binding will crack," she told him anyway. "It is on loan to you for eight days—"

" _For the last time, it's mine, woman_!" Dracul roared and tore up the stairs, leaving the Librarian below.

— — —

 _Oh well, and we were having such a pleasant library visit too. Reading is so dangerous. I still don't know what to say about this chapter because it ends on not one but two cliffhangers. See you next week?_

 _I might have cheated and made Gabriel leave the combat cross behind because him losing it in the sea would be, um, problematic._

 _The beta readers also tell me they are very concerned for Jabir's safety. There is a chance, Internet, that you are concerned too. Allow me to not put your fears at ease—at all. I don't know if he's okay, but I do know that I don't wanna write it and find out. Which is a completely irresponsible thing for a writer to say. I'm being reckless with your hearts and the life of a cute, fake little boy possessing a boat._

 _Anyhow, as always, thank you for reading, favorite reader! Have a lovely week! - SM_


	8. A Father Promised Him

_Disclaimer: I don't own CV: LoS. This story contains references to folklore and fairy tales. On occasion, it retells stories available in the public domain._

 _These chapters are getting long. If the 8k beasts are annoying to navigate, let me know in a PM, and I will break them up into parts from here on out. Also, I'm (slowly) re-uploading my chapters the fic because I'm changing 'Dracula' to 'Dracul'. It is very annoying when a fake person is poking you in the back of the head the whole time you are writing and complaining you are spelling his name wrong. So, we are changing it to 'Dracul'. Nothing else will change._

 _WARNING: This chapter contains awful, neglectful parents and stressful, hostage situations._

 **Chapter 7—A Father Promised Him**

The National Library had very graciously put out a bench for those forced to wait on the Dracul Archive in light of its new status as a fire hazard. Alucard had taken up on this bench with his e-reader for that very wait. He finished a very short book, _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ , before he began a very long one: _The Magic Mountain_ by Thomas Mann. But seven o'clock in the evening fast approached, and the library would close soon.

From the library's highest floor, the director's voice carried richly as he called the late hour to his patrons, as every director of the National Library of Light and Shadow had for almost two hundred and fifty years. In such a massive building with hundreds of thousands of ancient, powerful, and frankly devious books, electronics were unreliable, so there was no intercom system. In 1959, one was installed and operational for just three days before the state-of-the-art speakers began to whisper every word from the primeval language of a sovereign demon from beyond the stars.

The archaic words were long and hissing and blared over the speakers all hours of the day and night. No one ever found the reader, but her voice grated and gurgled, and tar bled from within the speakers when she dragged her syllables. Listening to her reading from an apocalyptic dictionary triggered crippling headaches, but most worryingly, when all the words from that lost language were spoken, the traveling demon would hear the Last Word. It would call to him as he swam through space, and he would return to collect a life tribute from every human being on the North Amerian continent.

The intercom system needed to be stopped, but first, human academia debated it. Researchers of arcane linguistics, eager to study eldritch words not spoken by humankind for millennia, protested a missed opportunity to grow the wealth of human knowledge. Warmongers and the military sided with the researchers: what threat could hold against an Ameria armed with the Last Word?

The US President was silent, but an ambassador from the United Mexihcan States refused to hear this since the demon spoke to Mesoamerian princes first eons ago. The old language and whatever benefits the demon brought belonged to Mexihco. Representatives from the Dominion of Kanada, the NLLS's staff, and Citizens against the Last Word claimed the language went unstudied with sound reason. 'But why did the speaker choose to speak now?' the arcane linguistics professors argued, 'what did it mean?' While the warmongers entreated: 'Think of our enemies. Think of how we will crush them with this Last Word! Don't you want to defend the Amerian people?'

'I am an Amerian person,' said the leader of Citizens against the Last Word. 'I will die—happy—to never hear the Last Word spoken.' As Kanada's delegate tired deeply of these questions, these circles.

Alucard heard the weariness in the delegate's voice as he listened to the whole stupid fight over the radio on the ship from Britannia. He moved quickly, with his thoughts only for D.O., for the National Library. There were always occasions such as this over the centuries, occasions where he vetoed humanity's right to argue about annihilating themselves. There were human errors he could do little for—their systematic mistakes, global warming, wars, white collar crimes; all misbegotten fruits of human greed—but demons he could slay, apocalypses he could redirect. Alucard went all the faster to the U.S. at the chance this demon-summoning language was a sign of Satanic movements to come.

Either way, whether this was accident or hell's work, if no sensible decision was made before he touched ground, Alucard would break into the National Library and tear out the genocidal-demon-summoning intercom system himself. A committee literally unplugged the bedeviled device while he waited on the library roof in the foggy, gold light of the dome hanging over the atrium. A late January snow fell as North Ameria, and Alucard with them, sighed their relief. The dead intercom system was disposed of quietly. The library stairs and sidewalk lay littered in pieces of speakers crushed with extreme prejudice when they continued to speak.

He hadn't stayed in Ameria in 1959. Ameria was all stars, and stripes, and boisterous arrogance, but he especially did not stay for the libraries. In 2059, Ameria was still those things, but the National Library building had finally aged well. At fifteen minutes to closing time, its wings emptied, its tables cleared, and its patrons took their studies elsewhere while Alucard read in the peace of old things.

But when he had some hundred pages behind him, the stone dragon retched terribly, gagging and flapping its wings as it alighted, shuddering, above the door. The archway cracked with the heaviness of the dragon's landing as the red door flew open and his father roared up from the archive and thundered out of the library, his rage barely contained within Alucard's illusion. It shimmered and crackled around him, ill-fitting and splintering magic. His father's true self leaked out, like a dark gas, until a draconian shadow climbed above him to drift immaterial through the balconies and shelves. The light of the golden atrium darkened with its passage as the dragon's shadow traveled invisibly through the poor souls in the upper floor. Dracul was both the angry man, sullen and dark, trudging through the library below them and the phantom of a raging, winged lizard shredding their peace.

Alucard turned immediately for the archive's door. The Librarian had followed up the stairs at her even keel as the stone dragon clattered down over the Archive door.

"Never bring that _vicious_ patron back, Librarian! We live only because he _believed_ I could kill him," it hissed, panting as it returned to its post. " _Never_ do this to me again! I shall _never_ recover! Hear me, madam, I shall _sue_ , and I shall _quit!_ This is simply, plainly _workplace endangerment_!"

The argument continued in the 'silence' of minds speaking, and their words struck Alucard coldly, but he had long ago grown used to this chill, this chill of voices besides his own in his mind. The conversation was directly shared between the Archive Guardian, the Dracul Librarian, and Alucard approaching from the bench. Such telepathy was the only speech allowed to the Librarians that was truly free of the pains of the Mark of Holy Silence. It was a privilege reserved for returning patrons. His father was not among the initiated, not yet, but Alucard was almost certain in the car that Dracul's ears buzzed from their talk, even if he couldn't hear them.

"No need for theatrics, Sir Julien," the Librarian told the stone dragon, her 'voice' cool and airy, and her volume _omnipresent_. "Is that not true of any you threaten?" Sir Julien, dragon of the Dracul Archive, scowled before its body stilled, relaxing into stone again. Her head, her mask, turned to Alucard as he came to her, and his shoulders sank.

"What happened?"

"He found something he did not want in the Archive," the Librarian said and her words echoed beside Alucard's thoughts. "I am afraid it made him very upset, and the threat suppression system was activated."

"We are a very strict security system, madam, Mr. Wulf," Sir Julien reminded them from the door. "He meant to lay a hand in violence on the Librarian. If the system had not intervened, she could have come to harm, and the 3D Reality Printer would have destabilized."

Alucard was quiet, remembering that the guardian was only a machine, however draconian, however articulate. The machine had its absolute laws and followed them absolutely. It was an elaborate creature-computer encoded through long, tangled spells written in hermetic verse and Java—the harmonious marriage, and petulant child, of alchemy and automation. The genteelly named 'Sir Julien', avatar of the 'threat suppression' system, watched over Librarian and Archive at the bidding of an 'international effort' to control what the world knew of a certain towering figure from the darkest hours of human history. Verily, Dracul darkened those hours, but what humanity knew of him was very little, and almost nothing true, and the 'international effort' intended to keep it that way.

"I did warn him," Alucard said.

"He was civil," the Librarian assured him. "I liked meeting him," and she spoke with lightness in her voice and the barest animation in the mask's matte expression. Alucard knew she would. He had been in contact with the Archive since the late eighteenth century and had known many Librarians before this one. All were masked, all were marked, but no other soul in that line of work had the chance to meet the Archive's namesake, to ask him anything. Perhaps no other wanted it, not even she, truly, but Alucard would never know it if the Librarian never told him.

"Civil but for the _inciting event_ ," Sir Julien interrupted. "We are not paid nearly enough to accept such behavior from— _historical artifacts_."

"Sir Julien," she rebuked, "we remain professional—always."

"He thought of killing you. I heard it like the shatter of a circuit, all its electricity jangling, madam, and _madly_. A puppet's show of holographs was all that pacified him, all that bought you time enough to flee," Sir Julien said, crawling down from its door to glare at her and flick its serpent's tongue, to show her with narrow eyes what it thought of 'professional'. "I should think you well-read enough on your _subject_ , my dear, to recognize that."

" _Always_ ," she repeated, "and I am _exceptionally_ well-read on my subject. Indeed, he is nearly all I am permitted to read. I understand what risk I take, but he does not frighten me. If he kills me, he will not leave the Archive."

Sir Julien barked, dragon's laughter. "What a fine trade! I understand life is of little consequence to the woman who has none—no face, no name—but I happen to aspire to have children and enjoy wine, piano, and the theatre."

The Librarian tsk'd at that—dourly. "What aspirations are these? You will have no children, and you've never been to a theatre."

"They are _dreams—_ what have you?"

"I have the D.O. United," she said somewhat lightly, "and I want for nothing else."

Sir Julien clicked its stone jaws shut, its teeth a serrated puzzle coming together, and said: "You've your soccer team and nothing more. How sweet, how _tragic_." It smiled as lizards do. "Then I will remind you, _madam,_ that the Dracul Librarian is not easily replaced. Few hunger to take your place. Protect your flesh and spare others your fate. To study the Prince of Shadows and his relics comes at highest sacrifice and lowest honor—as you know."

"As I know." She told her face away. The guardian only cackled and eased back into the red stone, appearing empty-eyed in its sleep. Alucard put a hand on the Librarian's narrow shoulder for no more than a breath before he released her and bowed his head to take his leave.

"I have to go to him, before he gets much farther," he told her and turned to pursue—

"Adrian," she called before he left, "he will want to call on the Archive again—he is hooked."

" _God, no! Do not let him! Have you not heard a word? A warning? Do my legal threats mean nothing?_ " Sir Julien interjected from its slumber against the door. "We live only because the Prince of Darkness's understanding of digital alchemy is— _nonexistent_ , as is his knowledge of popular culture! He has never seen _The Matrix_ —"

More important, Alucard knew, was what the Librarian and the Archive Guardian were not saying—that inside the Archive's threat-suppression system, 'the mind makes it real' worked both ways. One needed to believe in the system's projections to be hurt by them, but without 'empathic support' from the 'target', the projections failed—holographic puppets. It was fragile; even the smallest doubt could short the system, and Dracul was the only who 'lived forever'.

The threat-suppression system may have had an easier time controlling him if Dracul had seen _The Matrix_ , but only 'may', which meant that the system would be no help _'if I should ever need it.'_ Alucard did not know how to interpret the very dull thud in his chest of unwarranted disappointment.

Meanwhile, the Librarian did not answer the Archive Guardian, but the way she crossed her arms told Alucard she was still completely certain. It would only be a matter of time before she proved right. And she knew—better than anyone living—when the Dracul Archive had its teeth in a visitor, even if that visitor was its reason for being.

"He will want more," the Librarian promised. "There is much he doesn't know," and she waved a hand back to Sir Julien's red door, "that is all in there."

"I will talk to him as best I can," Alucard said and was gone, after his father and leaving the Librarian to the griping of her guardian.

— — —

His father had stalked west from the Library. The sidewalks were emptier for his passing. Even the congestion of the streets thinned, humanity making itself sparse in his presence.

Alucard sensed his passage in the anxiety and alienation streaming intensely off the people remaining on the street. Unconsciously, strangers walked close together, seeking safety in numbers with other humans. They clung like rats to the walls of buildings, keeping in shadow, their shoulders hunched, as prey animals making themselves small and plain in his father's path.

—All of them afraid, and not knowing why, but still so afraid—

Even in Ameria, which had never known the Dragon, the mortals knew this rage would end them—if it chose. The Washington White Snake slashed with the blood of its citizens appeared in an anxious flash through his mind. _'But that hasn't happened,'_ Alucard assured himself. However furious, Dracul would not get far without calling the Guards to him—and the Amerian Golgoth Guards would come, dumbly fearless and just as dumbly powerful.

When Alucard sharpened his senses, his father's trail appeared to him as a spectral stream of red smoke. It moved along the avenue, and he followed, pushing ahead of the fog of human fear, as it crossed off the busy streets and turned into a park. The desolation was strongest here. Even the trees seemed nervous to breathe, trapped as they were with the Prince of Darkness ruminating. The heavy cloud of his anger over the park had driven even the weakest lives off. For now, not even birds dared roost here.

Only the Guards remained, stubborn in their patrols. They had thickened on the ground. Seven street units had ambled into the park, following the human anxiety spiking in response to a supernatural threat. They hadn't been drawn to Dracul yet, but his father appeared soon enough—him being the only seemingly human body in the place. Despite the aural rage of the Dragon tangible on the air, he looked only—pensive. He stood on a stone bridge overhanging the river and leaned on its pillared railing, staring down into the dark water and at the false reflection of Gabriel Belmont flickering over the river's surface. The reflection dwindled and blurred in the falling night.

A little book sat on the railing beside him, positively burning with the protective magic of the Dracul Archive. A hundred spells all fighting the corrosive powers of light, moisture, the oils of human skin, and even time itself surrounded the little book in a strange, spectral 'fuzz' that nearly made it painful to look at for long. Alucard's nostrils flared as he stepped onto the bridge: the old book smelled of his father's blood— _freshly._

And his father's mere pensiveness seemed too still, too unmoving, too death-like. So, he approached him from behind, with all slowness and all warning.

"Father?" he asked once close, and his father, with Gabriel Belmont's graying hair and Gabriel Belmont's blue eyes, whipped his head to glare at him.

"That woman has the Vampire Killer, Alucard," his father said. " _How?_ You hid it—"

An emotion like surprise flickered over Alucard's face, and then, it was gone.

"I hid it; it is still hidden. She does not have the Vampire Killer—"

" _I know what I saw_ —"

"You _saw_ the inside of the 'black box,'" Alucard continued calmly. "You were going to touch the Librarian," _'in violence,'_ a memory of Sir Julien's voice reminded him. "The Archive's security system responded. What did it show you?"

His father stepped away quietly before his voice sharpened.

"I was _shown_ —Simon—as he _stabbed me_ , with the Vampire Killer, while _you_ held me back."

Alucard was still at first. "I know it looked _incredibly_ real, father, but it wasn't. The threat-suppression system studied you. It threw up your memories of—an unpleasant death—to check you. Nothing more than projection."

"You tell me I dreamed that?"

"Yes, and no." Alucard was deliberately noncommittal, because noncommittal was the nature of the machine. "It is like your transmutation rune," he attempted. "Things go in, but do leave it with their original shape. Inside the rune, reality changes as we decide what it will be."

"That answers nothing—" Dracul turned back to the railing, to the book.

"The displays are _deterrents_ ," Alucard insisted, "but it is only a machine."

"Why do they have such a _machine_?"

"The Archive takes guarding your record _very_ seriously," Alucard said. "That is why I warned you—the Librarian opens the Archive, closes it, and overseers everything in between. They will not let idle violence go." His father seemed to listen, even as he glared down at the river again, at their reflections floating over the black water. "The threat-suppression system cannot kill you, but it will paint madness all around you if given the chance. _Don't_ dare it again."

"I will not," Dracul said simply.

"Do you swear it to me?"

"I swear it to you." But his voice stayed flat and low, and the oath had no weight to Alucard's ears. He remained uneasy. His father's rage still smoldered on the air, like hot wind carried from a far and terrible blaze, but it was quiet, and they were still so very alone over the river. The Amerian Guards roamed slow as boulders through the park.

"You are still angry," Alucard began when his explanation seemed to alleviate nothing. "What's really happened?" His father seemed to slump at the railing, suddenly bowed by a thousand years, before he hackled up again. One of his fingers just touched the corner of the little black book.

"Did you know she had this?" his father asked heavily.

"I don't know—what else did she have?"

"Don't speak coyly with me, boy," Dracul barked, his weariness buried. "This book should not _be_ —it should be _ashes_." He snatched the little book from the railing. "How did they find this? _How?_ Nothing and no one can help you if _you_ 'donated' it to them—"

" _Enough_ ," Alucard said firmly. "Stop this— _now_. Nothing is left here but the Guard. If you carry on like this, they will be led right to us." Dracul scowled as a streetlamp bloomed over them in the thickening evening. He laid the book down over long marks clawed in the stone railing. His father had broken through the glamour, and his fingers bled 'human' blood for it, the nails dark and bruised. Shades of his true hands flickered over these ruined 'human' paws. Alucard looked away from the wounds as Dracul's hands curled into fists over the stone.

"I did not donate that item," Alucard promised him. "I give them nothing that is not already mine."

"Then how did they get _this_?"

"What is it," Alucard asked again—directly.

Dracul slid the little book to him, and Alucard opened its cover at a practiced ninety-degree angle. His the sort of care for an antique codex the Dracul Librarian certainly appreciated.

A single line had been written on the first page with a delicate quill, the penmanship neat with sweet loops and leaning letters. There was a careful sketching of a starling sitting pretty in ink as well.

 _'_ _Dear Book,'_ the line read above the drawing of the bird. ' _You hold my soul now. Be gentle.–LV'_ Alucard shut the book without reading a letter more, finding all he needed to know about the identity of its writer in that single line.

"I understand now. I _did_ know the Archive had this, but I didn't know seeing it again would—upset you."

"How did they get this—tell me _how_ —"

"There isn't much to tell," Alucard answered. "I don't know how they came by them—the Varenheid Journals are not the oldest items in the Archive, but they are among the first collected." He paused to watch his father—not staring at him, or the book, but into the darkness over the river. "May I be honest with you, Father?"

"What," Dracul began darkly, "do you want to say?"

Alucard looked a last time at the little book holding a soul, whose writer asked for gentleness.

"I thought you had forgotten Lisa."

"I had!" Dracul snapped, and then, again, softer: "I had."

There was no sound but the city, its October wind and monotonous blare of traffic, of trains. Alucard put a hand on his father's shoulder and left it there as he said:

"Then, you should not read this." He squeezed once and let go. "Don't read it, Father, and don't keep it. If you have truly forgotten, let it lie. I will take it back to the Archive—"

Alucard reached for the little book, but Dracul grabbed his arm roughly. The invisible talons prickled the underside of his wrist.

"I will do what I want with it," Dracul growled. "It's mine—"

"No, it is Lisa's," Alucard reminded him, impassive to the pain—even as a drop of what little blood he had struck the railing, "and she is long dead— _let it lie._ "

Dracul saw what he'd done and released Alucard; he looked caught over the damage before he glared at the black horizon again.

"I don't want to read it," Dracul said, his voice thick with—emotion, "but I don't want these books in that— _place_ —"

 _'_ _I don't believe him,'_ Alucard thought, _'I don't,'_ as the Dracul Librarian's claim that he was 'hooked' crashed into clarity. When she died, Lisa Varenheid left the world journals—of the strange life she led.

Dracul only had one.

If allowed, he would certainly go back for the others—

"It will be safe if kept there," Alucard tried instead. "It is old—it is already crumbling outside of the Archive. It will decay completely if left for long."

" _No_ , I," Dracul insisted. "I will keep it—"

"Listen to me, Father, _listen_ —I only mean you well, I swear it. Take it back to the Librarian— _tomorrow_ —"

They were suspended together in stalemate, neither shifting from his position—the book must go—the book must stay—the dilemma too simple for compromise.

"Tomorrow," Alucard said again and resolutely. "Now, I am tired, and I am going home. These last few days—have been long. I would like you to come with me." The little black book disappeared from the railing and into a pocket of Dracul's coat, tucked alongside his heart.

"I'm in no state—" Dracul told him.

"I want you to—I did not bring my father all this way to leave him out at night in D.O." Alucard attempted to smile, to lighten the mood. "You will get mugged."

"I'm not afraid of muggers—"

"It is the muggers _I am_ afraid for—now come."

Dracul shook his head, the stalemate rearing again—and Alucard, tired of the arguing, tired of the day, relented him this—for now.

"Very well—this is my street address," he said, giving his father a square of folded paper.

Dracul took the paper, turned over once in his hand before he tucked it too in the coat pocket next to his heart—he must have brushed the cover of the little book as his face softened.

"Why do you remember her when I do not?" Dracul asked, almost forlorn. "I remember— _nothing_. I can't even recall the color of her hair."

 _'_ _Blonde,'_ Alucard thought, remembering the flaxen hair under the deep hood of her cloak. She had worn a heavy, red black ring and carried a candle.

She glowed like a ghost in the dark halls—she, the only human living in Castle Dracul, her breath a soft cloud on her lips in the icy fortress.

"Because," Alucard said, "for a long, long time, I have made a point to remember all of those whose lives you— _affected_ —"

Dracul grimaced—dark and miserable. He swore at once: "I didn't kill her—"

This was irrevocably true, and Alucard needed no word from his father or a dead woman's journal to confirm it. The words in the journals would never amount to any danger if Dracul _had_ killed her, which was precisely why those journals, their memories should lie. The Dragon's fury burned hottest when—vindicated.

"It doesn't matter," Alucard told him, "and it is beyond all mattering now. Give the book back—and come home soon."

— — —

Alucard went home, and Dracul followed him—his son at rest in an automated taxi while his father crossed the city over its skyscrapers, finding his way along unorthodox pathways. He tired of hiding, of passing, of avoiding the killing gazes of far too many Golgoth Guards. He broke the glamour where he could stand it: the false human nails splintering and bleeding as he forced his talons free to claw a path up Alucard's apartment building. It hurt, intensely even, as every grasp of a handhold felt like knives through his fingers. The pain spread rapidly into his arms, fire in his bones, as he scaled thirteen stories and a high fence onto the dark roof. Then, as pain always did, it began to fade and he found a cone of light to sit in—and perhaps think. The little book seemed to tremble in his pocket.

He went to reach for it and stopped—red blood wetted his hands. The human fingers he wore were bloody and destroyed, the flesh fissuring around uprootings of deep black talons. The unharmed skin that remained had sickened, turning vampire pale and gray. He stretched and squeezed his wounded hands as he waited for the injuries to subside, but the illusion refused to recover itself, as if the work of hiding what he was had become too much. The bloody fissures deepened—darkness and bone underneath—as Dracul growled, made fists of his hands harshly, and ripped the illusion up his arms. Cracks lanced through the flesh and human form, the guise's pieces suddenly hanging over him like shards of a broken mirror, until he shattered the illusion of the old, human man completely—and was himself again.

And the cold and the dampness had no meaning anymore, nor the heat, nor anything so basely elemental. He was beyond human caring such as that—but the little book was having none of it. It protested the night mightily: its protective enchantments screaming against the moist, cold air. Dracul took it from his red coat, the magic distorting reality around the book.

It had no title—only a black cover—

 _"_ _Don't read it."_

Dracul gritted his teeth at the unbidden memory of his son's words—his warning.

"I'll do what I want with it," he told the night and opened the thin leather covers. The little book was truly enchanted and smacked Dracul's fingertips with fire as he opened the binding too wide. The burning persisted until the book was 'satisfied' with its handling—the white security light bleaching the old pages. The journal was written on soul paper, a mystic parchment derived for the civilian scribbler from the enchanted scrolls the Brotherhood of Light took on their missions to record their discoveries, and their final moments.

The first line suddenly became quite apt:

 _'_ _Dear Book, You hold my soul now—be gentle.—LV'_ , with a sketching of a dark-eyed bird—

He turned the next page—no drawings, only a note tucked in the corner:

 _'_ _To my aunt Lisa, whom I love best in the world, for her nineteenth birthday, this April 23_ _rd_ _: 'magic parchment' for all your thoughts and lovely drawings! Love, your most favorite nephew, Nathaniel (as transcribed by Mother, your sister, Elaine)'_

—words meant for a stranger—someone he did not know—nearly at all—but he kept turning pages, searching for something—something he knew—

A hunting party unfolded—mostly in sketches and some words. _'Nathaniel is three years old today,'_ the stranger wrote. _'Arthur and my brothers are hunting in his honor. Elaine is taking me out for a lark.'_ The words broke for the sketch of a lady hawk, small and fierce, its wings open as it clutched a dead lark—then, portraits of the child of the hour and his mother—four men on horseback, the woods drawn in spindles of shadow—their kills from the day: dead-eyed foxes with plush furs awaiting skinning—

—and a Knight of the Brotherhood.

 _'_ _Christopher has changed so much since I saw him last,_ ' the stranger noted to the sketch of the young knight newly dressed in the gold-trimmed armor, his face unreadable. Sketched on soul paper, his eyes seemed to flash and move, his expression to change, his lips to turn, as if to smile—at his portraitist, _'but the armor suits him so finely._

 _'_ _I hope he thinks of me now and then.'_ The writer then proved herself not one for suspense. _'He does—oh, he does! But not now—after he returns in winter.'_ She didn't write any more of the birthday hunt, only sketched her brothers' falcons and a doe drawn hard against the bright surface of a lake.

Time seemed to pass: she didn't mark days, but gradually, she sketched the coming of summer, fields swaying with grain, piles of kittens and new foals on skinny legs, before she drew fallen leaves, empty fields, early snow collecting filthily in gutters, as the estate wintered.

 _'_ _It's been a peaceful autumn while Papa's been away,'_ she wrote, and then, she did not write again—for pages, in fact, for what must have been weeks, perhaps months. She only drew. Some of her pages only full of practicing sketches of hands—her left hand stretching, bending, reaching, fingers curling. Then more sketches of her family; little Nathaniel; the Brotherhood Knight, his smile ever gentling in her memory as she waited for winter; her father's hounds; the courtyard and fountain under her room as it shifted with the season. All events and visions entirely mortal and none were what he _searched_ for—and then—

 _'_ _A self-portrait—for I am nineteen and a half today and I have been meaning.'_

He seemed to know her on this page—his heart achingly aware of her face.

She had sketched herself from her mirror: a girl fair-haired and young. The self-portrait drawn on soul paper appeared intensely vivid: the colors of her pale hair, her gray eyes, and the blue gown she wore bleeding through, like a painted photograph. The sketching showed raw talent, an interesting appearance, but otherwise, she seemed— _dull_. By nineteen years of age, Lisa Varenheid had led only a tedious, maiden's life, and she was well meant for the dull future sure to follow. Hers would be an ordinary life and uneventful happiness: marriage to a knight, _that_ knight even, and children. She would have lived comfortably. Brotherhood wives often did, especially if Christopher had been of any note. Their purses were heavy with _'Demon's gold,'_ Dracul reminded himself—the old world still on his mind from earlier.

A drably happy life must have awaited her, after these childish records of birds, family, and learning to sketch human hands. In her portrait, she was human and young—her youth beautiful but gawkish, only a girl still—

—but not for long.

She was not much younger in this portrait than she was when—

His head tweaked, and he heard Alucard say again in his memory: _"Don't read this—"_

But he pressed a page on, a harmless page on—

And she stopped drawing abruptly, leaving her father's wintry estate undone as she wrote: _'Papa returned from abroad today. He says he has found a husband for me in the North—'_

Dracul shut the book too roughly—its magic nipping his fingers—

For this page was where it all began.

And instantly, he remembered the old merchant in the snow.

He remembered Old Varenheid.

 **Tale II: The Dragon's Courtship**

He was a hard man, Old Eckhart Varenheid, and very rich for it. With his wealth, he commissioned the only blacksmith in Wygol Village to modify the interior of the fine carriage that had brought him from his bright, southern homeland into the bleak, strange north. It was a black beauty of a contraption, with dark, curtained windows, walls paneled in soft ebony, and velvet benches, pulled by magnificent coldblood horses, massive and regal. The iron laborers of ruined, wasted Wygol had never seen a coach nor horses so fine.

Old Varenheid's instructions for his custom modifications to the carriage were very specific: a ring to be mounted on the wall of the cabin with a short chain, irons, and, of course, a key. He paid the blacksmith seventy-five silver for his work—double the metal, double the labor—

—and joked cordially to the ironworker that the money was the last of his daughter's dowry, who would not be needing it, married lady she would soon be. The ironworker had attempted to laugh for the customer, as the joke was strange, but Old Varenheid did not care. He went on his way, taking his handsome carriage and his fine horses off into the Wygol Pass, the gulf of death and snow between Wygol and the Old Castle.

He did not travel alone. Trunks had been strapped to the back of the coach, and the innkeeper's son belted this luggage back in the rack again. Whispers in the kitchen said that Old Varenheid had a young woman—a daughter, it seemed—put up at the inn and confined to her guest room since the evening before. She had been seen by almost no one since she arrived and was not seen as they departed. Old Varenheid seemed a possessive chaperon and boarded her in the coach without a witness—

—with reason.

"The irons are perhaps too cruel," Old Varenheid told his daughter once they were well and truly on their way from the dank, little village. The beautiful wheels of their carriage bouncing over the ruts in the frozen road. "But you mustn't try to run away again." His youngest child wept, and had wept for hours, without sound or sob anymore—the chain clinking when she moved, her wrists in the irons, the key in her father's coat.

"Now, I cannot stay and ride in the coach with you any longer. I've had to fire the coachman. He'll ride no further, and we cannot miss our appointment with the devil. We shall get there—you and I."

Lisa sniffled, a sob choked in her throat.

"Do not be angry with me, child," her father said, opening the coach door and stepping down onto the clean snow. "We shan't be in this much longer now."

Lisa's chain rattled and caught, the links shuddering as they squeaked about the ring, as she lunged forward:

 _"_ _Papa—NO! Papa, please, no!—_ "

Old Varenheid shut the door, his daughter's voice muffled by the curtains, the velvet cushions, and the fine ebony walls. He paid the dismissed coachman his final wages for traveling this far and sent him on his way, with all gratitude and a pleasant "Forget what you've seen," before Old Varenheid himself climbed up onto the coachman's box, cracked his switch over the team, and drove on into the pass.

The Devil's Castle had risen from the mountain, where its wreckage had lain strewn and cold, after a hundred years sleeping. It cast the pass below in its shadow, the dark slashes of its towers on the snow and frozen trees.

For now, it was silent.

When he had first seen it breach the crest of the mountains weeks ago, Old Varenheid was not aware he was one of the only living men to see it returned so close. He was preoccupied at the time—as he was late returning south—and a stranger to the cold land, the ruins of Wygol, and its legends. It was a cursed place, and he had agreed, but for the wrong reasons: a blizzard had choked the main roads with snow and driven him into the Wygol Pass—if he was to continue to make good time. The roads were so long abandoned, they were little more than wheel tracks over bits of icy cobblestone. But the early winter storm that had driven him there had still been softer in the Pass, its old roads left passable. So, merchant, men, and draft horses forged ahead and dragged their carts against the snow along the far wall of the pass, out of the shadows of the Old Castle's towers, all day and into the night.

But as the sun sunk below the mountains, the Castle's shadow stretched, touching the far valley wall like a long, clawed finger—the merchant camp in the point of its nail. When night had fallen, the valley was darker than dark. Even the full moon behind the tall, spindly fortress crowning the northern mountains did little for the blackness.

Then, in that impenetrable night, the devil appeared—and killed all of Varenheid's horses but one, and killed all of Varenheid's men but himself. It sprinted through them—taking out their throats, the snow steaming with their blood. He had pleaded for his life with the crooked, bloody creature across his bonfire, the flames twisted and guttering in the winds.

It had looked like a very old and shriveled man, its eyes two points of red light, with wet sores that blackened its torso and stank cruelly even over the smell of blood and burning wood. That night, surrounded by the bodies of his beasts and his men, Old Varenheid made the devil a deal to spare his life. He kept his bargain: with all haste, he returned home and brought back one of his children to go in his stead—a life for a life, evenly exchanged. He knew now the creature must have come to the camp wanting some man's child, and Old Varenheid was a merchant. He would sell even devils what they wanted. He could be made to act honestly in his dealings as well, especially when the devil took his blood. With his blood, the devil would know if he tried to cheat it—his blood being his child's blood—and where to find him, and all he coveted, if he did not return at all.

But now, all parts of the transaction would be complete, and he would live. Ice crackled under the hooves of the team as his youngest daughter was silent in the carriage, after what must have been miles of sniveling. He, a widower, had two sons and two daughters, four children in all—Lisa was his last. Two of the children, the eldest girl, Elaine, and boy, Konrad, were already grown and married, Elaine with her second child. The middle son, Karsten was away in the deserts at war—a young knight in the service of God and the King.

Lisa was his last—his youngest—awaiting a husband in his house as daughters were wont to do. It had been very simple to dismiss concerns from associates, friends, and his son-in-law about taking his daughter so very far North—a fiancé waited for her! And a daughter married so far from family would never be seen again anyhow. But very soon, once Lisa was gone, Old Varenheid would have no memento of his wife at all. She had died long ago in childbirth. He thought of Elisa now—in passing—as every day, Lisa had become her mother's mirror. Soon, there would be nothing left to keep her memory by.

Only what survived in the face of Elaine: the eldest, the most meddlesome; a daughter utterly disinterested in her own father's grief or suffering. Her disdain had only grown worse since she married, and her opinions spread to the others. She had fought the 'engagement' hardest—demanding to know the identity of this distant groom, why he did not come to claim his bride and address her family himself—

Elaine, made far too arrogant by a husband in the ship trade, took offense with how Old Varenheid raised his daughter in nearly every way. She even tried to take her from him, and insist he not use the name his wife, his Elisa, shared with their final daughter with her dying breath, Lisa's true Christian name—

"Father," Elaine had said. "Konrad and I do not want you to call Lisa 'Elisa' anymore—it is not what she likes to be called." Those children, and their _insinuations_ —he would call his daughter whatever he pleased. It was his right!

And so too would he do this; for it was his right to take her to the North for the appointment. The appointment itself was not set, the devil had asked to have his child for his life before the next full moon waned, and after tonight, it would wane. He did not quite trust the devil, so he had made arrangements to arrive at the place where they had struck their bargain by midmorning and to be far, far away by late afternoon.

These arrangements proceeded smoothly, the morning sky over the Pass blindingly blue until it clouded and darkened over the old castle in the mountains.

That castle seemed to rise higher than he remembered.

And Lisa had no idea it approached, no _real_ idea. She knew the castle—and the devil, surely—was out there, waiting—waiting for her to come to die in her father's stead. But now, the curtains were pulled, the coach dark, and she sat on the floor, wedged between the benches. The chain and irons jangling with every pitch and rise of the old road under the carriage as the manacles chafed her wrists, the sweat of her panic condensing between her skin and the rough metal.

She was too hot and too cold, overdressed in the wedding gown her mother and her sister had worn as winter brides themselves. This was not how she expected to wear her wedding clothes, but the dress, and the blue velvet cloak, were the warmest clothes she had now, and the frigidness of the pass was not kind. The white dress ill-fitted her, but her father had not wanted to commission a new gown. He would leave such luxury to the fortunes of the foreign husband—

—and Elaine had paled to hear that, though Lisa quite understood his decision now.

 _'_ _Elaine…_ ' who had wanted so much to believe in this offer, even from an elusive foreigner, even as it distressed her to tears the morning Lisa left. Elaine wanted it to be real, so that the last of her siblings could finally escape their father's house and be free of such an empty, unfeeling man. Though Old Varenheid could certainly be cruel and was, the everyday emptiness of being his family was worse. He acted out with neither hate nor love, only thorough indifference.

Even now—Lisa was here, chained in this carriage, on her way to her death, for her father's indifference.

 _'_ _Elaine,_ _there is no husband—there never was, but I will be rid of him, at least,'_ Lisa thought, dejected and leaning her head back against the carriage wall. She closed her eyes, so stickily hot even as her breath fogged in the cabin. _'Will my sister even know what ever became of me? Will Papa just—lie to her? As he's always done? Until she stops asking?'_ She stared at the line of cold light under the black carriage curtain and smirked in spite of herself. _'How far will he go to hide this?_ ' During the weeks before they left, he told any who inquired that his youngest daughter was finally betrothed to a distant suitor. She almost smiled at the absurd excuse now. _'Will he keep it up? Will he fabricate news for them from me at Christmas? About my foreign husband? And his foreign land?_

 _When I'm dead.'_

"My father is a—is a _beast_ ," Lisa said aloud, her whisper turning tearful. If there were angels in the coach, surely they did not think her language harsh enough. She sat up, the gown rustling like heavy paper. _'I have to tell them somehow—'_ She maneuvered her manacled hands along the side of the right bench, her bench, to find the little black book she hid there—her book of soul paper. With her hands like this, she couldn't write much at all, but she wouldn't need to, and she opened the book as best she could over her lap. Lisa opened on a clean page, closed her eyes, and _willed_ —

The soul paper began to prick with light. Shaky, red letters writing themselves with a quill of brightness—

 _If anyone should find this, please tell my sister, Elaine, wife of Arthur Bernat, and my brothers, Konrad and Karsten Varenheid, that I am dead—and killed by my father! Only my father!_

 _Do not avenge me. Do not look for my body. This pass where he left me is the lair of a devil, and there will be nothing to find. Please, dear sister, dear brothers: tell Christopher that I always cared for him, but the choice wasn't mine. I think of him now, and I wish him well._

 _I love you all! I wish you lives that are happy and long! Elaine, bear Nathaniel's sister safely! (I know she is a girl.) When the time comes, I will be waiting for you all in the hereafter—whatever waits for me there—whatever waits for the murdered—_

 _—_ _I pray God understands my anger—I hope my father suffers and burns—for this, for everything, for Mother—for everything!_

 _—_ _I do not want to die—_

 _—_ _Please someone—Elaine!—anyone—_

 _—_ _Curse him!—_

 _—_ _I'm not ready—_

 _—_ _Christopher—_

 _—_ _I will miss you—_

 _—_ _I don't want this—_

 _—_ _Someone, please—_

 _—_ _Save me from this!—_

 _—_ _I don't want to die!—_

 _—_ _if I have to die like_ this _, for_ that _man, then don't let him leave this valley alive! Devil, kill him! What monster strikes this bargain and keeps any promise! Kill him—_

Lisa gasped, the soul letters continued to write without her, falling down the page like a rupture of ink as they carved out the spurt of her emotions—her panic, her anger. Her head throbbed, her vision blurring and sharpening as the pain pulsed in and out, and she tasted salt and blood on her lip. She touched her face carefully, her forefinger coming back red with blood.

 _'_ _My nose is bleeding again,'_ she thought and sighed as she looked at the ruin of her writing. The red light of the spirit writing cooled to black ink, but the wobbly letters seemed written in ash. They appeared faint and delicately lined at first before she lost her hold on her emotions, and the angry words tore wild and dark over the paper. The final lines written with so much force, they were barely readable.

 _'_ _I'm feeling too much,'_ Lisa thought, defeated, and cupped her face with her manacled hands. _'This will comfort no one—but—but I have to try again—'_

Her father called to the horses, and the carriage braked, rocking to a stop. Lisa shut the journal and stuffed it in her cloak, wiping the blood from her nose as her father climbed down from the coachman's box. He went leisurely, walking a distance from the coach to relieve himself, and in the death stillness of Wygol Pass, she heard every footstep, every action. Then, he came back to the coach, opened the door, and looked in on her, sitting in the pathetic tangle of her wedding cloak.

"We've arrived."

— — —

 _'_ _Varenheid' is a variant of 'Fahrenheit', Lisa's maiden name. I wanted this twist to be a surprise, so I changed the spelling to hide it._

 _The trick to retelling stories, fairy tales and otherwise, is knowing what to change and what to leave alone. The Lisa/Dracula storyline is so archetypal, it really reminds me of a fairy tale. I've wanted to write a Lisa/Drac story with Beauty and the Beast elements for practically forever. So, Plot C will retell Beauty and the Beast rather coldly, and though I've planned a gothic romance at heart, it happily veers into gothic horror._

 _I never wrote BatB-type fic for Classic CV because the characters of Dracula and Lisa are, well, thin. I'd have to do so much character work myself, it would be hard to say much of anything about the source work, and I really wanted to write a CV fanfic with BatB—because English degrees, fairy tales, video games, free time, and all that. (And I am so grateful to all you wonderful human beings visiting to read this…thing I patched together with my hobbies! I love watching the stats climb. Thank you!)_

 _I forgot about the idea until I played LoS and discovered Gabriel is, like, perfect for that kind of gothic romance. I understand why MercurySteam condensed Elizabetha and Lisa into one character, Marie, but what a missed opportunity for angst and drama. Oh well. That is what fanfic is for, right? To be honest, I am still unsure about if this counts as an OC romance. So, I will treat it like one and take all cares. Lisa/Drac is canon somewhere, but it's somewhere besides LoS._

 _Thank you for reading! I will be back next week.–SM_


	9. The End of the Bargain

**_WARNING:_** _Contains graphic descriptions of a major burn and other injuries, stressful and scary situations, physical abuse, woefully awful parents, suicidal ideation, and resignation to death/human sacrifice. All in all: Lisa's dad is still a worthless human being._

 _Remember what I said about the tigers come at night? Lisa dreamed a dream. I'm kidding. I'm sure it's not that bad. I think. I've read it so many times while making revisions, I'm a little desensitized. (But "On a scale of '1 to Fantine', how doomed is Lisa?" is a question I have asked myself while I planned this story.)_

 **Chapter 8—The End of the Bargain**

 **The Dragon's Courtship**

The whiteness of Wygol Pass in the morning nearly blinded Lisa before it laced with black and frozen trees. Her father became a dark shadow among other dark shadows on the snow below the castle cloaked in storms.

Lisa blinked and knew at once: _'That's the devil's house.'_ She pressed further back into the carriage.

"I'm not getting out," she told her father. She hoped for anger, but instead, she began to cry, her voice hitching. "I'm not getting out—"

"Lisa—" He stepped into the coach. Lisa tugged her legs away, tucking against the wall and glaring at him.

"Cut my throat yourself, _you coward!_ "

"I didn't agree to that," her father said, plucking up her hands and unlocking the manacles. Lisa jerked away, the chain and irons clattering against the wall, and pulled from him as he reached for her—

"I'm not going!"—he grabbed her wrist, dragging her forward—" _No!_ _Don't you touch me—_ "

Old Varenheid smacked her hard across the mouth before he grabbed her chin, forcing Lisa to look at him. Her lips stung.

"No more," he ordered. "Be silent—"

She shook her head fiercely, tugging out of his grip.

"No! You're going to let it—let it _kill me_! I'll scream as I damn please—"

He grabbed her face roughly again, pinching her mouth. She bit her tongue, a burst of blood, gasping—

"I doubt the devil is alone in this valley," he warned her when she was still. Old Varenheid dropped her heavily, knocking her against the bench. She mustered, sitting up, her side aching.

"Why should I care what knows you're here—"

"I will strike you again. I do not want to—but I will. Now, get out. It is time to go—"

She pushed off the floor and shoved him, throwing her father out of the carriage and onto the snow as she slammed the door shut and threw the latch. She lay against it, breathing heavily. Outside, it was utterly silent, and she shrank for that silence. Either she had hurt him, perhaps badly— _'Papa? How? How did this happen?'—_ or he was simply too angry to speak—

The window panel overhead exploded inward, showering her with glass as Lisa screamed and hid in her cloak. Her father broke in the ruined window, fumbled with the latch, and tore the door open. A bit of blood spilt down his face; she had hurt him a little.

 _'_ _Good!'_ she thought, _'you—you bastard—'_

But he was not patient anymore. He dragged her bodily from the carriage until she collapsed on the old snow, cold and hard as stone. Lisa fell on her side and the chain of a saint's medal she always wore broke and dropped her pendant coldly. The medallion rang over the snow until it lay still and dully shining.

"We are done with this protesting," her father said with the tone he took with dogs, and children, who tried his patience: "Now, stay."

"Papa—" she pleaded from the ground. He came back at once, his boot coming far too close. She winced away, pulling her arms protectively over her face—

" _Be still._ Another word, and I shall ensure you cannot run."

— — —

High above deathly white Wygol Pass, the wind sang through the old castle's towers cold as a dead woman's wailing. The wind whistled like it was desperately lonely, like it had lost—more than it could bear. It whipped the banners ragged with its cries, the encroaching storm its tears to come as it spun and tore itself in despair.

After listening to the wind howl so, day after day, for regrets it could not part from, the Dragon in the Old Castle resolved not to accept loss anymore. A year ago to this day, he resolved to start over—

—with a new son—

—who _understood_.

The beast in the belly of the Castle thought this was a good plan. It was important for him to have family. It was important for him to have something to care for. It was important for him to forget the ache of old things. Such importance would put vigor in his gray veins again. When they agreed, the Castle around him was voiceless. Its thoughts only turns and twists of feeling in his own body, as if he and the block and stone were one.

But of course, they were, the Castle said, and so it inquired, gently: how would he do this? Find a new son?

He was weak, so weak, weak and starving for ages, and there were barely any armies anymore. The people had not come back to the lands he blighted in over a hundred years, and without people to harvest, there were no human parts, and with no human parts, there were no armies—only him—alone—

But his weakness was no matter to him. The child would have to come to him, he decided. A son who understood him couldn't be stolen. Injustice seeded rebellion, and such a son as his would rebel against what the world gave him either way, but he needed to find the _right_ son.

"I need a father who is as much demon as I am—one who would condemn his own child, as I condemned mine. As my heavenly father condemned me," he explained to his listening throne room, because then, that child would understand what he did and why he did it as his own son could not.

They could share the common betrayal.

He had waited for the whims of the world to bring him the right man. He had time.

And the time had come.

The blood he had taken nearly a month ago warmed with that man's presence in the pass again.

— — —

Old Varenheid's face had healed, but the marks remained so white and puffy—little, scarred smiles from where the Devil clawed his cheek during the last full moon in this pass. That night, the devil asked for his child, and his child he had brought.

But on that cold night, the Devil had stalked to him through the firelight. His shadow fell on still warm bodies of slain men and horses, and Old Varenheid could not move, for even the life of him. _'Where can I run from this warped—this perversion of nature—'_

With the Devil's every step closer, Old Varenheid sank in the snow, until he was on his hands and knees, bowing, hiding—his chapping hands buried in snow. The Devil came beside him, and his arms hung, long and like a scarecrow's, at his sides. Old Varenheid glanced up at him only once—for those hands dripped with his men's blood.

The Devil began amicably enough: "Have you any children, old man?"

Old Varenheid did not rise from the snow, did not dare, and swallowed the fearful thickness in his throat.

"I have two daughters, dark lord, and two sons."

"You are rich in children, my friend," the Devil said, his voice warm and dark as a gullet. "Do you want to see your children again? Your daughters? Your sons?"

Old Varenheid swallowed again, this time with nothing to swallow down but perhaps his soul, which feared for itself and yearned for escape. His voice shuddered.

"My lord, I do. _I do_ —"

"Then bring me your youngest," the Devil commanded, "and leave him to me."

The feeling had gone from his hands, even as Old Varenheid opened and closed them in the snow. His own bones empty and cold as his breath grew ragged.

"But my youngest is—" _'My youngest is a daughter,'_ Old Varenheid thought, his mouth continuing to work but silently, _'my youngest is all I have left of my wife,'_ but the Devil did not want his thoughts.

"I don't care to hear sniveling," said the Devil, dropping the heaviest of hands on Old Varenheid's shoulder. The merchant sank with the weight. If he could have slipped into his grave to escape that hand, he might have—but he wanted to live. "I am offering you your life for your child. Will you take it?"

Old Varenheid's voice refused him, and he gasped, wet and airless at first. He closed his eyes and found he was weeping with his fear.

"I—I will take it," Old Varenheid said at last, and the Devil released him to graze his cheek with a cold finger.

"Very well." The Devil seemed pleased, until he dragged two of his fingers up Old Varenheid's face and broke the skin. The old merchant cried out, and his blood trickled in two furrows down his cheek. The trickles met at the line of his chin and dripped onto the Devil's palm waiting below.

"My youngest," Old Varenheid tried against his quailing voice. "You want my youngest?"

"Your youngest," the Devil said. The merchant's blood had gathered in the middle of his palm and glowed in firelight like a dark coin. A little tremor shook the blood, and it split into dark rivulets that flew over the Devil's hand and fled into a vein at the hinge of his wrist.

Old Varenheid watched his own blood swim. "Then, we've—we've an _agreement_ , lord?"

"I've left you a horse, and I give you a month," the Devil answered. "Before the next moon wanes, I want my child, and if you do not return, I will know, and I will kill you. If you bring me a child who is not your youngest, I will know, and I will kill you."

"I—I will bring you my youngest, my lord, I swear—oh, God help me—Don't kill me—"

But the Devil had gone.

Four weeks on from that night, Old Varenheid cut the lines strapping his daughter's dowry chest to the rack of the carriage. It splintered up its corner when it fell, and he dragged it away to the side of the road.

Lisa watched him leave the chest there. Her heart sickened as she knew no one would come looking to find it, _'Not here.'_ She looked around slowly—her father was busy disposing of her possessions; the horses jittered. _'Perhaps, if I am quick—'_ She tried to rise from the frost without a sound, even as her damned dress dragged after her—

"Don't run," Old Varenheid called to her from his work. "Don't—move." Lisa did not argue but neither did she listen—

"Elaine is grateful to you, for seeing this through," her father said, and Lisa stopped cold.

"E-Elaine?"

"Elaine knows," Old Varenheid told her, coming a cautious step toward her. The snow and broken glass crunched beneath his boots. "She—she agreed that you should go. You will save us, Lisa. When he found me here, the devil threatened to wipe us all out—from the oldest to the youngest—if you did not come."

Lisa listened, her arms hanging at her sides. _'Elaine? Elaine said I should go to this? Elaine—'_

"You're _lying!_ —"

"Little Nathaniel will be safe all his life for your seeing this through! And Konrad's daughters! And Karsten's unborn! All of them safe, Lisa! If you stay when I go—Elaine begged me to make you stay."

"No, she didn't," Lisa said, her cheeks heating as she cried again. "Elaine didn't!" Her body weighed suddenly so heavily, she sank in her skirts in the snow. "She _wouldn't_ —"

"Will you stay when I go? Will you stay for them?"

Lisa didn't move. A wind came, eerily, rocking the open carriage door, and Old Varenheid banged it shut as he glanced from his daughter on the ground to the wind rattling the trees, and it seemed the time had come at last. Lisa saw him think it and tried to muster the strength to scream—but his voice was stronger than hers.

' _No, Papa—please, no—'_

" _Dark Lord!_ " Old Varenheid called out, his voice carrying above the trees, the winds, sounding even in the mountains in such lack of living sound. " _I've brought the one who will go in my place! We are as we agreed! Leave me in peace!_ "

"How could you, Papa—how—"

He went to the coachman's box and readied to climb before he looked back at his daughter, his daughter weeping, his daughter who looked like his wife. The wind lifted her blue cloak, her white dress filthy. The red marks of his hands on her still fresh on her face—

"My daughter, yours will be a cold fate—but colder still, if the devil finds you. May the wolves of this Wood show you pity—Good bye."

 _'_ _You evil man.'_ She sobbed. _'You evil man—there are no wolves!'_ Nothing lived in this bowl of ice, even the trees were dead and blackened, cold for ages and ages. What wolves could there be?

Old Varenheid climbed, the wind dying at last, and struck the switch. The horses cried before they charged over the snow, dragging the carriage. Lisa watched it go, feeling empty, without even a heart, if not for the robotic pulsing, as she said to herself: "I hate you," and then she ran, stumbling on the awful dress, as she ran and ran, her legs twinging painfully, the skirts like running against water. She shouted with all her voice:

" _I hate you! God damn you! I've always hated you!—_ "

But the carriage clattered away, pulling from her, up the curving road out of the pass, back from whence it came—leaving her voice small in the silence. She stood in that silence a while, the roar of her father's carriage dwindling—the silence sucking up where their sound had been. Her every breath seemed immensely loud— _immensely_ loud—she almost wanted to cover her ears to block the sound—

"I will not die like this," Lisa said to no one, her voice rising. "I will not! Not wolves! Not devil! No, I will die of my own will!" She glared at the horizon of mountains at her back with the black crown of the castle. "You'll not have me! I swear it!" she shouted, her own ears ringing with her voice. "Chase him for his debt yourself! I—I belong to me—I do—I—" She weakened and fell to her knees. _'…I've never been so angry. I've never shouted like this—'_

She sat, resting, the chill creeping through her skirts, her cloak, creeping through her legs—numbness, and cried again. The air so cold, her tears burned. Lisa wiped her face roughly.

"Oh, stop, _stop_ —what's the use in it?" But her tears still came, coldly, and her hands went habitually to her throat, to her medal, but her neck was bare. _'My medal,'_ Lisa thought before she walked, very slowly, over the snow. _'Where—'_

The medallion finally winked at her from the old ice. The broken chain slunk away with a cool rattle as Lisa picked it up and rubbed her thumb over the medal. Embossed on silver, bold St. George, her birthday's Saint, made the sign of the cross and met the dragon with sword and spear and guidance from on high. The clean light of sainthood bathed him and _Ascalon_ , his blade, and the dragon cowered under his mount's bright hooves.

Her birthday aside, _'I am no Saint George,'_ Lisa thought. She looked at the sky, the blue vault splintered by the Devil's house. Her medal was very cold; her fingers stiffened with its chill. _'But—but was the princess not brave?'_ King Selinus' daughter, Sabra of Lasia, who donned her silk wedding cloak and went to the lizard's dark lake when the lottery summoned her. She who went to embrace death when not even her father's grief, a King's grief worth half his kingdom and all his gold and silver, could buy her freedom. Was she not brave to meet fate?

A kingly father was not so desperate to save Lisa, _'But if I do not go, the Devil will kill them—from the oldest to the youngest.'_ She clutched her medal, and slowly, it warmed in her trembling hands. _'I—I don't have much time,'_ and she bowed her head, _'but I will die of my own will—I belong to me.'_

Lisa walked then, striking out to the North, to the shadow of that fortress in daylight, and the castle seemed to come to her. She barely remembered the trees she must have passed, the road she must have walked until she found herself under the Devil's gate, before his drawbridge. Deep in the pass below, tracks from her father's carriage still marked the far side of the bowl. The sun and blue sky paled, and the barest of snow began to fall, and with every step she took, she squeezed St. George's medal in her fist.

The wind still chased her—it chased her since she had been down in the pass. A gust tugged at her hood, her cheeks scraped raw with the cold. She put a hand to her cloak and drew the hood tighter over her hair, her skin burning with the exposure as she steadied against the pillar of the gate.

 _'_ _I've no idea how I've come so far or so high,'_ Lisa thought. She looked into the canyon of the castle's moat beneath her. It narrowed to a silver thread of river deep, deep below. Its walls rushed with waterfalls, dozens of them, roaring distantly and hanging over the rock like the tresses of an old river goddess, the air full of their spray and curls of rainbow in stray sunbursts.

 _'_ _This is the last good place,'_ Lisa decided. _'It's—beautiful here. Must I—?'_ She swayed, her head aching with altitude, on the drawbridge. _'Must I go inside?'_ she wondered. _'Is this not close enough to—in there?'_ She clutched the elegant and spiked railing the bridge wore like a tiara. If she climbed the railing here, there was nothing to stop her from falling, but—

An archway in a cold, high wall stood between her and the castle itself—between her and an icy courtyard with a great stair climbing up, up to the great doors. The waterfalls hummed in her ears, the spray drifting coldly over the drawbridge, as the cascades climbed higher and seemed to fall from the ramparts themselves. She gripped the railing a little tighter and looked up into the clutch of towers. Ragged banners flew among them.

A deeper darkness began to creep on those banners from the sky. The very last of warm sunlight sliding away from the flags as the stormhead rolled from the horizon. It came up on the mountaintops fierce and black, dragging more wind over the drawbridge and into the devil's courtyard where it danced leaves and debris.

Thunder cracked in the stormhead, lightning lancing through the thick clouds as darkness flooded the canyon, dimming the brilliance of the waterfalls.

But Lisa kept her eyes among the towers, even as the storm urged her inside.

 _'_ _I feel—someone.'_ She winced in the insistent wind. _'I feel like someone is—watching me—'_

The feeling of eyes on her passed, and Lisa sighed. The Princess had not tried to drown in the dark lake to escape the dragon. The Princess had gone alone on the path into the dragon's grove, her wedding cloak trailing by the bones of those who had died before her, her silks sweeping over their steps in the dust. _'So must I,'_ and she went under the gate.

— — —

There were steps in the Pass, steps in the Veros Woods, and steps over the drawbridge—mortal steps. His child had come at last, the paths to the castle through the pass guiding it fast.

Except the castle inquired, gently: what child had he asked the merchant for?

For the steps in the woods and the steps over the drawbridge belonged to no son—and nearly no child—with most humble frankness, the castle promised. There was a woman on the drawbridge—a young woman in a white dress and a blue cloak.

He called the merchant's blood from within his body, and it filled his palm until he clutched his fist and squeezed. The strangled blood cried out in his mind, with the voice of the old merchant, _'Oh, my youngest child! My daughter who looks like my wife reborn!'_ The Castle heard it too, and the blood could not lie. The merchant had brought them his youngest child, who looked like his wife. What a burden for a daughter to carry.

Wiser to have heard the sniveling? the Castle asked with its voice from the beams and arches, and he ignored it. A young girl might do—though he had daughters of an eerie kind already: Euryale, Stheno, Medusa—but a young girl might still do. But how young? How much a woman?

He could not see her well at first, but he searched the daylight for her anyhow. In his decline, his eyes had become almost useless in such light. His pupils narrowed to the barest, black slits after taking in almost all light painfully. In short time, the brightness of the sunlight she walked in grew too intense, blotting her out. The shapes in sunlight flaring into indistinction against the snow. If not for the blue cloak, he wouldn't have seen her at all—but he _had_ seen her—

Immediately, he wished he hadn't seen her. When he did, his blood stuttered as his heart fired, beating to break his ribs, and he thought he was finally going to die. He had seen such a woman before, such a woman walking through frozen woods, many times before. A woman in such a white dress, such a blue cloak, the deep hood hiding her dark hair, her dark eyes. The white orchard around them strung in ice and picked of apples, stripped of leaves—

"It is not," he rasped at first, but his voice soon strengthened. " _It_ _is not_ —show me her face." At his whim, wind spun down from the fortress.

The blue cloak shuddered, and she hugged it close, bending in the surge of wind. She crawled along the drawbridge to shelter by a pillar, her face still hidden. He felt the hot points of her hands on the stone, the metal, as if she were touching his own body.

In seven days, he had not moved. He had no need, but he rose now and so quickly, the castle shuddered around him. He loomed tall and spindly, a withered shadow in the throne room, an old dragon.

"Bring her here—bring her to me."

Our Prince needn't do that, the castle reproached around him, its voices echoing in the high ceilings. The blue flames of the torches over his dark chair fluttered with its words—gently, always gently. They needn't keep her; that maid was not the right son—They could wait for the right son; certainly, they could try again—men like the merchant were many—one would come again, just as arrogantly—all they need do was summon up another storm—a long winter approached—

But his command rang in the throne room, an absolute voice overriding the surreptitious whispering:

"Obey me."

— — —

On the other side of the gate, the castle's great doors in the courtyard were open, beckoning.

Before, Lisa was sure, they were sealed. Their massive knocking rings hung in the mouths of iron dragons mounted on the doors. Only a giant could have knocked. She wandered into the courtyard underneath them until she hesitated at their stairs, which spread wide and bowed low as a lady's curtsy before the castle. Monstrous storm clouds crouched on the ramparts now. Slowly, the storm's shadow began to nip at her heels until Lisa climbed the stairs.

But on the landing, she saw only indistinct shapes within the castle: a receiving hall draped in shadow, its long and red carpet lit by iron candelabras worked into serpents. Their necks broke into nine heads, each with a red candle in its mouth, its wax bleeding. Lisa paused just inside the threshold, the last light of the courtyard stretching ahead of her in a blue arrow. But even as she clutched her medal, her heart faltered. There was still sunlight, however cool, on her back. _'I should go back—I should—'_

The doors swept shut behind her, the wind of their closing tossing her cloak as the receiving hall rang with their thunder. The closest of the candelabras clattered to the floor as the candlelight guttered and was gone. Lisa ran back to the doors and shoved with all her might, but they would not budge—

She had been screaming, begging the doors to let her out, but Lisa quieted and steadied herself against the eerie wood. Her courage failed her once, _'But I must go on, I am already here, I must go on,'_ though she didn't dare cross the rug and crept along the edge of the hall instead. The wall led her to a little corridor, walled and roofed in stained glass, and a stairwell, its lowest steps dappled in the colored light.

Lisa climbed through such colored light into the dimness of a mezzanine over the hall. A slender bridge crossed between two chandeliers to a far balcony. There, under an archway, was a luridly red door with a black, draconic emblem and a little, clawed knob in a ring of scales. It was not a warm emblem. A cold dragon's head glared from the door, its eyes sharp hollows, but _'Where is the Devil?'_ His receiving hall was empty, and ruined tapestries darkened his windows. But since she found his emblem, death must come soon, so she, weary now of waiting, called out over the great hall: "Hello?"

Her voice came back to her from a thousand corners. None of them brought the Devil, but the red door opened. Inside lay a shockingly tiny, emerald den. Alcoves crowded the dark walls, each with a woman, marble and shrouded, covering her face with her hands under her veils. Only one looked out baldly at the door from the swathes of her habit. This statue carried a lamp that roused brightly as Lisa neared.

Once she stepped inside, the red door closed behind her without a sound. The staring lady's lamp-bearing arm moved without a whisper until her light fell on a soft green sofa on a soft green carpet. This little room seemed to know how tired she was, and its dimness came about her, warm and patient, comforting. The little couch invited her to sit and then to sleep, and she did as the statue's lamp dimmed. Lisa's grip on St. George's medal loosened. As she dozed, darkness creeped in her vision. A voice creeped in her ears, on little, insect-like whispers—

— _take off the Hood—take It off—see the Face—_

 _—_ _be_ _Done with His Nonsense—try again—get the Right One—_

A specter leaned over her while she drifted in and out of sleep. A nightmarish tangle of wet, red vines, its dripping creepers preparing to put back her hood—

Lisa found herself already standing when her eyes snapped open on the empty den, but not empty enough. She knew it couldn't have gone, she couldn't have dreamed it—and it would come back. Her heart felt it breathing through the little green room, within the close walls still, as she jerked the red door's knob uselessly.

"Let me out," Lisa whispered as she kept trying. " _Please_ let me out, _please_ —"

Another of the marble ladies at her back offered her a single, unveiled hand from the wall with a mechanical sigh. The hand bent down on a hinge when Lisa touched it. A lock echoed behind the marble woman as she swung forward, a narrow hallway behind her.

Arches ribbed the ceiling of the corridor like the inside of a serpent's bones, and a green flame glowed far within. It hopped like a sprite in the bowl of its stone torchbearer. Lisa glanced back at the locked, red door, and the way back seemed truly gone, but really, _'I'm already eaten,'_ she thought, and this castle only drew her slowly through its gullet of hallways and doors, deeper and deeper—

She squeezed St. George again. _'I must keep going, I can't stop again, I must—meet death.'_ Her medal seemed too cold as she lingered. _'Perhaps it won't hurt. Perhaps it will be over so quickly, I won't even know it's happening—'_ She imagined so silent, so swift a killing strike where the blow fell, and her soul still wandered ahead, her body dead behind her; Lisa shivered.

The green torch popped loudly, calling to her, and Lisa startled. "I'm coming," she said after a breath and stepped inside. The marble woman swung closed behind her.

The hallway twisted her through more turns after the green torch, turns with colored torches—bright blue, red, and violet, and all popping if she hesitated. She passed another turn, a white flame, and sighed before she asked aloud: "Am I nearly there?"

In the dark ahead was another luridly red door, another draconic emblem. She began to grow wry with herself, her situation, the castle, and spoke to the architecture, her 'guide': "Are there very many of these?" As stone should, it did not answer, and she twisted the clawed knob. She came to another massive hall, this one hung with chandeliers and lined with hulking suits of armor. They rose twice as tall as she and slumped against their swords and pole-axes, their helmets bowed with galeas drooping.

"I am glad," Lisa whispered to the hall, "that this did not lead back to the balcony." She had never been so clever at words as her elder brothers, but she knew how to make light of such oppressiveness, and her heart could not take strolling through the devil's house anymore. If she remained quiet, the silence would suffocate her.

This new hall was grand in its ruin, the gallery of a long ago destroyed king, and light streamed through it from tears in the high ceiling. Ancient webs clung between the suits of armor as bats roosted in the great hollows of their chests. Hundreds of tiny wings rustled and multitudes of tiny, red eyes opened in the gaps in the armor's joints as Lisa passed by, the deeply blue marble beneath her feet blackened with ash.

An immense, black door waited at the end of the hall. It sat above the empty knights on a little throne of stairs. There was no knockers or handles of any kind, only a mounted spiral of pale stone, a galaxy ghostly against the black with a sharp sparkle of brightness at its center, like a needle. Curiously, as a princess to a spindle, she reached out to touch it but the spiral began to turn. It spun slowly, with the dark serenity of a spider binding prey. It drew its arms to itself until they were gone and only a white circle remained. The needle gleamed in the whorl of sculpture, and a line of shadow split the circle. The black doors cracked open and lumbered inward, the darkness widening.

No blizzard sighed from those doors, no icy wind, but heat, terrible, inhuman heat. It reached for her, and she pulled back to hurry a few steps down the little stairs. Ancient darkness flooded the doorway and washed the stairs in a spill of night, older than any shadow in the castle—

—and a voice rippled out from within, a rasping voice, like a great body of scales scraping over stone.

"Come in," it said.

 _'_ _It's the Devil,'_ and Lisa swallowed, _'It's time.'_ Perhaps she whimpered, hardly knowing her own sounds, before she forced herself to the threshold and stopped. Lisa could not budge—it was too dark, _too dark_ —her mortal soul begged her to stay put, stay out of that darkness—

The black doors opened wider to her, the light of the great hall sliding in, illuminating the lines of a long table, a dead fireplace. _'It's in the corner, there,'_ her senses told her, her heart in her throat. _'Oh, God—it's really there—'_

A candle burst into flame on the table, and then another and another, down in a line over the table. They were little, miserable lights, brightening nothing, but they took her eyes to the far side of the room—which lay flooded with complete sunlight from an open balcony. Its bar of light was bright as summer. She darted into the blackness, walking briskly along the line of candles.

 _'_ _Its—its eyes are on me,'_ she thought, unable to blink, her mouth dry, and her heart beating so hard. _'I feel it watching,'_ like its stare were inside her skin. _'Why—why am I listening? Why am I going inside?'_ She broke into the sun, and relief rushed around her, but _'it's still in the corner—it's still behind me—I'm not safe—I'm not—'_ She swallowed and willed herself to be still.

 _'_ _But it's time. It's finally time.'_

She turned haltingly, putting her back against the bright wall, so she could look at it from the light. The line of candles on the table winked out until only one remained for her—courtesy, perhaps.

 _'_ _It hasn't moved from the corner,'_ and she knew it like a deer knew a wolf, even as she couldn't see _it_. Its corner seemed darker than anywhere else. She had stood closest to it back at the black door and was furthest from it now, in the wash of sunlight. The light in this room was impressively strange: the room was not actually as big as it seemed at first, and it lay divided into perfect night and perfect day. The great table lay mostly in darkness, with only its farthest end and an ornate chair in light. A mirror hung over the fireplace, reflecting the dancing point of the single candle.

The candle shivered, and the black doors shut with a strike that shuddered under Lisa's feet. High in the air, dark chandeliers sang as they swayed, and the thing on the other side of the room began to move.

Lisa had no sense it walked. It rolled through its darkness, with no footsteps. She clung to the other side of the ornate chair as it came round the table to stop at the edge of the light. The candle light fell on one of its hands and climbed up its bandaged arm: its fingers stuck with an ancient ring and bits of a gauntlet. Some light even found its eyes, and they flickered redly—

Her father never regaled her with details of the devil he met in Wygol Pass. Perhaps he thought she might try to run earlier if she knew. Lisa knew only that it was a devil, and she knew now the devil seemed human in shape— _'and old,'_ she realized, _'very old,'_ the little light bringing such out. A tall devil, certainly, but thin, desiccated—the shoulders wilted, the face drooped, the eyes heavy and sleepless, the mouth drawn very hard—the hair long and white—

He was disarmingly old, and he seemed truly to be a man—a very old man. The frightful pace of her heart eased off as such old age coaxed a kind of— _pity_ —from her. He was older than anyone she had ever seen—

 _'_ _But it is a devil,'_ she reminded herself. Lisa crept from behind the chair, to see him better, until she felt him looking back in return.

"Tell me your name," he said with the rasping, dragon's voice that had invited her inside. His voice was quieter now, less echoing, like she truly stood with a man and not at the hot mouth of a dragon's cavern, but she still stopped behind the chair at the command. He stood on the lip of the sunlight, the darkness lying between them like a wall as light touched only on dry and drifting strands of his hair—

"Lisa," she said, her voice small. She kept a hand on the chair. It was taller than her, its back decorated in blue dragons—their sapphire eyes winked in the sunlight.

"May I—look at you, Lisa?"

She came around the chair slowly, reluctant to give up her shelter. The nature of his question, too, unsettled her—'Come in'—'Tell me'—and then, 'May I?' The request for her permission struck her as—peculiar.

"Closer," and this command was gentler than before, "you needn't leave the light."

So, she did not, even as she stepped closer as bidden. Standing so near, Lisa finally looked up into his eyes, dark and milky with cataracts.

 _'_ _This devil is old, and almost blind_. _How did he kill my father's men and horses?'_ But she rooted to her place as the old devil brushed back her cloak. Her hood pooled around her shoulders. The chill of the room seemed to stroke her cheek and lift the hairs on the back of her neck. _'Will he kill me if I stop him—'_

His hand lingered in the sunlight. It had absolutely no color, was not living flesh. In the light, it glowed too brightly. It drew nearer to her face, its cruelly long and curved talons nearly grazing her cheek, as it gave off no heat, barely separate from the chill air. He touched her hair, carefully, his face indecipherable, an ancient mystery, as he twisted a flaxen lock around two of his fingers—

—which began to tremble, his skin smoking before the flesh bubbled, blackened, and ripped open, oozing as it melted over the bones and bands of muscle in his hand, and in the shadow and candle light, his lip curled, exposing the yellow point of an inhuman canine—

He let her go, and she breathed again as he pulled his flayed hand back into darkness.

"Thank you," the devil said, clutching his arm to his chest painfully. Lisa tangled with another surge of confounding pity—her heart caught between _'he is hurt—_ ' and _'this is a devil!'_ Something had killed the horses; something had killed the men; something had driven her father to bring her here—and he was in this room with her now.

His wound began to sizzle, the wet burns crusting over with blackness. Its smell reached her, and Lisa swallowed, her nose full of blood rotting and burning, and—she didn't know—just the stink of burnt evil. She looked up from the wound to find his face in the darkness again.

"May—may I know who you are, grandfather?" she asked, the note of respectfulness for her elders—even her elder devils, apparently—not leaving her.

"I am Dracul," he told her, without any pretense. "I am not your grandfather."

Lisa flinched from him—flustered and frightened—

"You _are_ —" How had she wandered through this castle and never thought? How had she not learned his name from the doors, the halls, the emblems, the stone dragons bearing up the ceilings, crouching along the walls, carrying torches in their mouths? Even the chairs wore dragons; they looped the legs of the table. "My God, _you are_."

Why had she never thought of it sooner? Why not in the carriage? Why not in the Pass? The Dragon lay at the heart of every dark story of the North. The Dragon was why the North _had_ dark stories—the shadow of his wings never fading. He was villain time and again, and never a villain bested. Even the tales of the barbarian from White Mountains who slew him promised that human wickedness would simply call him back again—

—if he even allowed the barbarian to kill him—

—if he was not simply a dark blight the world would never be rid of—

And she found now she always hoped herself too small for a part in such a story.

Her stomach twisted sickly. _'I mistook the Dragon for a blind, old man—I'm a fool, such a—'_ Lisa looked away from him: sure her fear betrayed her, sure this floor would run with her blood soon. _'And now, I am going to die.'_ There were only moments left, in this last room, this last, awful room, she would ever see. Lisa sank on the ground, leaning on the chair. Her heart beat so fast, she could hardly feel it anymore but neither could she feel anything else. Somehow, and slowly, her heart eased with death so near, its hammering falling away in her ears. _'My family, I love you. My God, be with me. I'm ready,'_ and she did not bother lifting her eyes as she made her last words:

"I came here—to die," Lisa said and fought a stammer, "as my father promised you I would. I'm—I'm _ready_ —"

He retreated from her, into the deep darkness again, leaving no footsteps. He was just suddenly far away, at the black door.

"I will not kill you," he said.

"Wait—wait, please," Lisa called from the floor. "I—I was told if I didn't come in my father's place, my family would be killed—from the oldest to the youngest—"

The darkness was thoughtful.

"And you came in his place."

"I don't understand—"

So, he reminded her: "You came in his place—willingly."

It winded her now to imagine any of this as willing—after the chains in her carriage, the horrid fight—her final moments with family—her father's leaving, without even a backward look for her screaming—

But she had walked into this castle, _willingly_ , for all intents and purposes, had come to this room of her own _free will_. _'I will die of my own will,'_ she remembered, _'I belong to me. But then—'_

"Then—what happens now?" she asked.

"You may stay—willingly—"

Her heart leapt at the words. Lisa understood such politeness, particularly in one who veered so clearly from commanding to permissive, and she had to know, at once, now.

"Would—would you really let me go? If I was unwilling?" Lisa asked. The fact that she was having this conversation winded her further: _'I'm so—confused. I don't understand this mercy—I don't understand—'_ She steeled herself against her confusion. _'I must keep still. If I am not—calm—I will certainly die—'_

"You stay willingly," was all he said.

"Why?"

"Because—I want for company."

"Company?"

"I am here—alone."

Lisa looked down at her hands for answers that were neither there nor in her head. Company? He wanted _for company_! What kind of want was that? Didn't a Dark Lord of his power and his violence have no need? No need for—human pleasantries? Company! _'What in God's name—'_ Her heart ran at a gallop again, intent on leaving her if she insisted on remaining in his presence any longer, listening to this insane request.

But still, she asked, for certainty: "I will not be killed? I will not be harmed?"

He shook his head.

"You swear it to me?"

"I swear."

She looked down again, wishing to be somewhere else but having no place to go. His gaze seemed everywhere.

"May—may I think about it?"

Her heart, and her mortal soul riding in it, wanted her out—out of this dining hall, out of this castle, out of this pass, and away. He offered mercy; she should take it and _leave now_ —

Because to stay _willingly_ must mean to stay _indefinitely._ Perhaps only to die later. What honor did a devil have? And to stay, and perhaps to die, _in this place_. For the rest of her life—if he did not kill her—her heart beat faster and harder just to think of it—

— _All_ of her days—

—In _this_ place—

—With _this_ thing—

But _her father_ had brought her here. Her _own sister_ had begged her to stay, to protect the children, if she wanted to believe Papa. If she believed Papa, where could she go back to? Would her family even receive her back? If she left, would her father's deal be revoked? (What honor did a devil have?) And how would she leave? The winter—perhaps Dracul himself—gripped this pass until it bled dry, of warmth, of greenness, of any hope for spring—how would she walk back? Already, the light from the balcony grayed—the storm that reared over the courtyard, its thunderheads hanging like mountains over mountains, rolled across the sprawl of the old castle. How would she walk back _now_?

 _'…_ _and do I want to go back to that family?'_

"I would like to think about it," she said again, surely this time, when he did not answer. He had not said he would let her go, but neither had he said he wouldn't— _'I will hold a devil to whatever honor he has.'_

"There is a place for you—through there," his voice came a final time, and she knew he was speaking of a door at her back, bleached into invisibility by sunlight and stonework. "Come back here tomorrow, at this time. Tell me your decision."

And then, he was gone.

But the candle remained, burning alone in the dark, as black clouds swept across the balcony. The storm she had run from in the courtyard suddenly battered the window, plunging the dining room into blackness. Even though she knew she was still alone, she took the candle in one hand, with her medal in the other, and found the door. It was faced with sculpture, a stone knight stood guard—a lone and grim St. George with his sword drawn and a fat, wingless lizard dead and decapitated at his feet, black head cut from black neck.

Lisa was nearly pleased to see the heroic saint, but the shadows of the stone flickered viciously just in candlelight. She jumped when a blaze of lightning lit the dead lizard completely—the white light hard on its lolling tongue and eyes upturned in death.

All she could conclude from this statue was that the Devil displayed—unusual choices in his decorating. Perhaps, the image was meant to comfort her? It had, however _heavy-handed_ in its violence.

Lisa touched St. George's sword, its gold hilt bright, and like the marble lady before, he swung aside onto a little corridor with seven doors. She stepped through the eighth, and it shut behind her. The six doors at either side of her were sealed and dark, while the far, seventh door stood open—a fire burning inside its room. The room inside was vast and dark with the storm. When lightning fell, its high windows lit nearly to the ceiling. The storm sieged the balconies outside, far trees tearing in the torrents of snow as stone gargoyles bore the assault, long spikes of ice hanging from their mouths.

There was a high bed here and other furniture made blurry by the storm and the flickering light of the hearth. All the room's corners were shadows, their darkness shallow and empty.

But at this moment, the door to the little corridor chose to close, sharply, of its own devices, and at this moment, of all moments, in light of all she had seen and been through, Lisa chose to scream out _now_ , her shriek echoing in the high ceilings. She covered her face, wanting to cry and then crying, as she went back to the corridor door, and stared at it— _'Maddening door!'_ —closing, opening on its own— _'Maddening door!'_

She dropped her medal and it rolled away until clattered on the wood like a coin.

"No, no more," Lisa said, trembling, as she put the candlestick down on the floor. "I'm not going out anymore—I'm staying here—I'm staying—" She sighed deeply, dropping her cloak too in a sorry pile.

 _'_ _I should, I should find out what time it is,'_ she tried, speaking in her head to calm herself. _'So I know when to go back—to the dining room—tomorrow—'_ She thought she heard a gentle ticking over the fireplace, and she had. A clock ticked there like a friend, a familiar, mortal machine, but it was still too dim to see the clock's face.

 _'_ _The doors open and close by themselves,'_ she reasoned. _'The doors will tell me when to go.'_ It made about as much sense as anything else here. Her hands shook with her tiredness as she wandered in a circle again, fretting from the bed until she came to the corner beside the corridor door—and sat in it, drew her legs to her chest, and dropped her head in her arms. She curled up in the comfortable dimness created by her own body—and the clock began to sing the hour—

Lisa counted the gongs:

—one—two—three—

—four—five—six—

—seven—eight—nine—

—ten—

 _'…_ _Is it only ten o'clock in the morning? How can that be? How is it only ten o'clock?'_

Had her father left that village at dawn only _five_ hours ago? How had so much happened in only five hours? _'I feel like I've walked for days—'_

Lisa began to breathe shallowly, her head heavy, her bones lead, until she slipped off, asleep, somehow.

She knew she was asleep because she dreamed, and she dreamed not of darkness but of a garden—sunlit and blissful, with a babbling fountain and warm, green hedge walls. She sat in a corner of the hedge, as she did in the room St. George guarded in the castle, knees to chest, head in her arms, but surrounded by spring.

A woman came to where she sat, a woman in a white dress with lovely, dark hair. She did not try to stir her from her place against the hedge, only sat down beside her, and put her arm around her shoulders and leaned against her.

"You are doing so well. You are brave, so brave," the woman told her, patting her shoulders. Her voice sounded like Elaine's, and hot tears welled in Lisa's eyes. "Be always brave; cry, of course, but never for your regrets. It is not over yet." Lisa flinched to hear that. "You will wake up, and be where you fell asleep again—but you must bear it, bear it and have courage. It cannot frighten you forever, and you are here in this cursed place to do something very important. The Dragon will be slain and laid to rest again for your efforts. You will not recall this when you wake, but your heart must always remember—above all else, before any distraction—you are here to find the mirror, Lisa."

"And we're here to help you!" a girl's voice interrupted. Her voice came from on high, as if she sat on a garden wall overhead. Lisa could see her kicking her bare feet in the air, without looking for her. "You're never by yourself in this! Never for a moment!"

— — —

 _To Guest (who reviewed ch. 6 on 3/17/16), it is my pleasure._

 _And Favorite Readers, I'm sorry this chapter was so long. I just couldn't find a strong place to break it. There were plenty of weak places, but I'm not sure it was worth it._

 _Anyway, I like Marie. I like Marie and Gabriel, and Marie is Lisa's only trump card against certain death. So, I wanted her in on this too, and I may have shoehorned Claudia in there at the end as well because I love Claudia, and all my favorite (dead) LoS ladies will be in the fic, so help me. I've already written Laura's part, and I can't wait._

 _There may or may not be new chapters next week because I am running out of fic (I've written through ch. 15, which is about half-way), and I really need to take some serious time to write more of it. So, we may go down to a long chapter every two weeks—unless ch. 9 is feeling like cooperating with me. We'll see._

 _Thank you for reading! - SM_


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